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Welcome you to the first Westervelt lecture. But first, we have one theory about the sound system. It's not been long enough to develop the discipline, but the theory is that perhaps cell phones that are still turned on, on silent mode, might be interfering. So we ask that you turn off your cell phones all the way, if possible.

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Thank you. Not many of us would want to stand in Dr. Mary Louise Bringle's stead for committee work. At Brevard College, North Carolina, where she is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, she chairs the Humanities Division.

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This means that she not only keeps track of faculty members, But she keeps track of a certain type of faculty member. She keeps track of the linguists, and the artists, and the writers, and the philosophizers. Hers is the proverbial work of herding cats.

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But that committee does not seem to be enough. She is currently the president of the Hymn Society of the United States and Canada. And it seems that even that committee work is not enough, for there is another round a very important round of committee work that she has added to her workload.

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She has accepted the appointment and now serves as the chair of the new hymnal committee for the Presbyterian Church USA. An admirer of hers says that she will be an insightful and judicious and loving guide to that process. Mary Louise Mel serves committees but she also teaches and writes hymn texts.

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And the Presbyterian Church is not alone in benefiting from her hymn texts. The major music publisher, GIA, has two collections of her hymn texts in books, and it's not a surprise that these have found their way into the hymn collections of Mennonites and Roman Catholics, Lutherans, the United Church of Canada, the Church of Scotland, Episcopalians. Mel will speak this morning about hymns as pastoral care.

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We will get to hear about that, Paul. This is what she does. You can find in her collection a hymn text that helps us sing and pray about persons with memory loss. You can find in her hymn collection

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a text that helps us sing about the complexities of September 11th. These are all not new hymns. She has been doing this thoughtful work for a long time. And through her teaching and scholarly work, she strives to bridge the disciplines of theology and psychology.

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And currently, she brings those fields together through a contemporary approach to the seven deadly sins. Work that has culminated in two books, one on despair and one on gluttony. Mel holds the PhD from Emory University, her undergraduate degree from Guilford College. She is a consultant for the Office of Health Ministries of the Presbyterian Church USA, and a member of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Hendersonville, North Carolina.

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And it is a good thing for Austin Seminary to welcome Dr. Brindle. Well, I've decided on a new desideratum for any place I go to speak. Henceforth, I want to be introduced by a masterful homiletician.

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What a great thing that is, Jennifer. That was wonderful. So thank you for that. And thanks to Ted Wardlaw for the gracious invitation to come and speak here.

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And to Kevin McClure, who will be accompanying us as we sing some this morning. And also to the Flatow family, whom I know not of, except that they endowed this wonderful lecture series, and I'm grateful to them for making this possible. Every time I am invited to go somewhere to speak, I remember an occasion, probably about 10 years ago now, when I was invited to give a series of lectures at a little church in southeastern North Carolina.

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It's called the Prestige Lectures. And this was that anomaly of Presbyterian churches that actually expected people to come out after dark. Not only once, but three nights in a row. This lecture series was for nine lectures to be given over a three-day period, breakfast, noon, and night.

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When the pastor originally invited me to come and give those lectures, he let me specify any topic. And at that time, I was working on the seven deadly sins, as Jennifer mentioned, working on them academically, not just personally. And so I thought, well, I'll just give lectures on the seven sins.

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And so he said that would be great, that would be wonderful, we'd love for you to do that. Well, time went on and I began thinking nine lectures, seven sins. And I couldn't figure out an elegant mathematical way to fit seven lectures, seven sins into nine lectures. So I

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I had just recently begun my passion for congregational song and studying hymnody. And I had started teaching an adult Sunday school lesson at my home church on the history of congregational song. Now, I thought that can surely take nine lectures. So I wrote back to the pastor and I said, would it be OK-- this was still eight months out-- would it be OK if we changed the topic?

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And instead of speaking on the seven deadly sins, I spoke on the history of congregational song. And he wrote back and said, Of course, Mel, you're the lecturer. We want you to talk about anything you want to talk about. He said, But I just feel the need to tell you that mine is not really a singing congregation.

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And I wrote back to him and said, You know, I couldn't help but notice that you didn't voice the same objection when I proposed to talk about sin. Well, it turned out, actually, that it was a wonderful singing congregation, and we had a grand time. My contention with all of this is that any congregation can be a singing congregation with the proper care and nurture. And we need that now as much as we have ever needed it in the life of the church.

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I want you to try a little experiment with me here this morning. Today is my cousin Marty's birthday. And I just want us to experiment with chanting Happy Birthday to her and Tiffany. Would you do that with me?

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Okay, so, Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Marty. Happy birthday to you.

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And you say you won't just chant it, will you? It loses something significant. If you just say those words and don't sing them, they fall flat. there is something about the power of song to lift our words in celebration and in consolation.

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And that's what I want us to think about this morning, the power of song to effect consolation, to do the work of pastoral care. Now, we have been thinking a lot lately about the Great Depression, have we not? And we have been thinking a lot about the Works Progress Administration and those initiatives to create jobs for people building roads and bridges and highways. What you may not remember is that there was also work for artists during the 1930s, so that artists were paid to go out and create murals on public buildings and to go into public schools and teach singing and lead community singings.

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And writers like Nelson Algren, and Zora Neale Hurston, and John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, all of them funded by the Federal Writers Project. One of the things that the Federal Writers Project had in view was to collect the narratives of people from all different walks of life, including the last living slave narratives, were collected by these people, paid by the Federal Writers Project. And it was going to create this vast mosaic of stories of life in America. Now, that mosaic never came to be written, but there are all of these interviews that exist in the archives of the Library of Congress.

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And as I was preparing these lectures, I just happened to actually came across one of those interviews that I want to share with you. It's a scene of laundry workers in New York City in 1939, and this is the scene. Women wearily pushing 12 pound irons. Women mechanically tending machines, shirts, thousands of white shirts that produce such a dazzling glare that the women who work in this department wear dark glasses to protect their eyes.

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The heat is almost unbearable. The smooth, shiny-faced women work in silence, occasionally dropping a word here and there, slowly wiping away dripping perspiration. A heavy, strong-armed woman pauses, her arms unflex. A soft, contralto voice gives vent to a hem.

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Warm, plaintive, yet with a hidden buoyancy, she sings a trifle louder, Could my tears forever flow? Could my zeal no languor know? The women tend their machines to the tempo of the hymn.

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They all join in. Their voices blend beautifully, though untrained and unpolished. You can sing this with me if you don't know the words, but you do. It's first on the top left of your handout.

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Rock of age for me, let me hide myself in me. Lie the water and the blood from thy there is no more stunning sound anywhere in all God's creation than people's voices blending like that in song and for years human cultures have sung songs

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to make work more bearable, or in our culture, to make underemployment or unemployment more bearable. We sing. Cultures have used work songs to set the pace for labor. Back in plantation days, the plantation owners required that slaves sing in the fields so that they could keep track of their whereabouts, not knowing.

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that in the process of singing, those people were forming a sense of identity and dignity and transcendence over the struggles that they faced. Eric Routley has said that hymns are the shanties and work songs of the Christian workforce. Hymns are the work songs of the Christian workforce, not just because they're what we do when we are about our primary work, which is glorifying God and enjoying God forever, but because they are what we do to keep our spirits up, to let the Spirit keep our spirits up while we are along the difficult journeys of our lives. There are so many hymns, and you know of them, that were written at difficult moments in the hymn writer's life.

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It is well with my soul, precious Lord, take my hand. We could go on and on and on. But we also think about hymns that were written or have been turned to in times not just of personal crisis, but of national crisis. September 11th.

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What did we all want to do but go and be with our congregations and sing, Oh God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come? What did the leaders of Congress do after they had stood on the steps of the Capitol and they had voiced their defiance of terrorism into the microphone and started to walk away, but someone struck up God Bless America and spontaneously they all joined in singing in times of national crisis as well as personal crisis, we turn to the pastoral care of song. Now, we know about some of the hymns written in this country in times of national crisis.

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I want to point you to a hymn from Scotland. It is on the back of the first page of your handout, written by John Bell in Scotland at the time of the Dunblane massacre. Do you know this story? On March 13th,

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1996, a lone gunman walked into a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and opened fire, killed 16 children ages five and six, wounded 13 others, killed the children's teacher, and then turned the gun on himself. It makes us think about the shootings in Amish country, in our own country in 2006. But this was a tragedy the likes of which Scotland had not known before. It was nationally devastating, these young lives so brutally snuffed out.

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How do you cope with something like that? If you're a person of faith, one of the things that you do is you turn to song. And if you are a hymn text writer, as John Bell and Graham Mall are, you turn to writing a text to try to express your own grief and your own hope beyond hope. Let me read you the text, and then we'll sing some of this together.

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There is a place prepared for little children, those we once lived for, those we deeply mourn, those who from play from learning and from laughter cruelly were torn. There is a place where all the lost potential yields its full promise, finds its lost intent. Silenced, no more young voices echo freely as they were meant.

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There is a place where hands which held ours tightly now are released beyond all hurt and fear. Healed by that love which also feels our sorrow. tear after tear. There is a place where God will hear our questions, suffer our anger, share our speechless grief, gently repair the innocence of loving and of belief.

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Jesus, who bids us be like little children, shields those our arms are yearning to embrace. God will ensure that all are reunited. There is a place. Let's sing stanzas three, four, and five.

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Women stanzas three, men stanzas four, everyone stanzas five. Women. There is a place where hands will challenge us tightly. Now are released in

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Now, you don't have to analyze the poetry of that. to feel the pastoral nurture that comes from singing it. And yet, part of why it works so well is that it's written so well that it works its magic on us whether we have studied it or not. But if you take a moment to study it, you notice that you have three long lines, eleven syllables, ten syllables, eleven syllables.

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and then a line that's cut short, which is precisely what happened to the lives of those children. And so the music and the poetry are in some way shaping us to see the cut shortness of life. And yet, if you also look at the poetry, it begins with the affirmation, There is a place. And the very last lines are, There is a place, as if coming home.

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And what that text is doing is taking us home, affirming to us that no matter what happens with the cutting short of life, there is a homecoming where all are reunited. So structurally, poetically, and musically, We are making a theological pronouncement, precisely as Paul Westermeyer would have us to do. And we are nurtured and consoled and instructed by the singing of this text.

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Singing helps us through times of personal tragedy and through times of communal tragedy. But the question really is why? What is it about singing? that has this incredible power.

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I want to suggest to you that we should not discount the sheer physiological dimension of song. After all, God made us to be bodies. And God pronounced bodies good and even chose to live in one in the incarnation. So we are silly if we despise the bodily.

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And there are some very simple bodily things that happen to us when we sing, particularly when we sing corporately. Now, if I had gotten permission from Ted Wardlaw, we could have done a scientific experiment here this morning. We could have taken cotton swabs and gotten saliva samples from each one of you as you entered the chapel this morning and put them in one place to be tested.

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And then we could have let you sing, oh four thousand tongues to sing, as we did, all how many stanzas we sang, and taken cotton swabs again and tested them. And you know what we would have discovered? This is actually an experiment that was done University of California at Irvine. They found, you're going to love this,

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They found that the saliva of people who had engaged in corporate singing had higher concentrations of immunoglobulin A. Oh, they say, well. Immunoglobulin A is a protein molecule that is part of the body's first line of defense against infection. When we sing, we are upping our level of immunity from diseases.

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And the experiment was replicated at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. And they discovered not only is there an increase in immunoglobulin A after communal singing, there is also a decrease in cortisol, in the chemical that is associated with stress. So communal singing boosts our immunity and lowers our stress. So friends, let me say something to you.

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I have rare opportunities to talk to groups of predominantly pastors. When you cut short that closing hymn, think about what you're doing to your congregation. I've got an amen here. All right.

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What would you ever, would you ever say, in the interest of time this morning, we're just going to serve communion to people in the first and last pews? And yet you are similarly depriving your congregation of something incredibly wonderful, powerful, and healing when you deprive them of song. I wish I knew what wag wrote this line. I wish I could claim credit for it, but I can't.

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It goes, Hymns are writ by fools like me, but only God sings stanza three. Well, I want to tell you that that University of Frankfurt experiment discovered that That it is not listening to music that has this healing power. Because they did the same experiment, the saliva thing, with people who simply listened to a Bach cantata or something.

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And they did it to people who sang. And the difference happens not from listening, but from singing. Singing requires us to breathe deeply. Singing oxygenates the blood, and there are certain bacteria that just can't live in the presence of oxygen.

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There are amazing bodily incarnate things that happen when we sing. Singing lowers our blood pressure. There was a study done by the Center on Aging, Health, and Humanities at George Washington University. They compared seniors ages 50 to 80 who sang in congregational groups.

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and seniors the same age who did not engage in corporate singing. And this is what they found. Those who engaged in communal singing had fewer doctor visits, better posture, fewer falls and other injuries, less need for medication, and a lower incidence of depression. simply from congregational singing.

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Singing stimulates the release of endorphins in the brain, those feel-good chemicals that we get from eating chocolate or having sex. Singing is safer. Singing blocks some of the neural pathways that pain travels through. So musical therapy actually makes people require less anesthesia.

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Singing is incarnational care. And because we're not just bodies, but embodied spirits, when you take the act of singing and you combine it with the words and theology of what we sing, what a powerful impact you get. The church has taught for years, lex orandi, lex credendi, what we pray is what we believe.

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How much more lex cantandi, lex credendi, what we sing is what we believe because the words that we sing are words that we incorporate, we take into our bodies, we literally learn them by and take them by heart. They become part of the fabric of our being to shape us in celebration and in consolation. Singing is pastoral care.

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So I think, frankly, when scripture says over and over again, Sing to the Lord, God is not commanding us to do that so much because God needs to hear our voices, but because God knows what an incredible amount of good it will do us if we will engage in that practice. Singing doesn't just maintain good health. There are instances in which it actually creates.

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health. Premature infants, for example. Studies were done with preemies, and there was a control group where the baby was simply stroked, as one would do, to try to nurture and support it. There was another group in which the infants were both stroked and sung to, crooned lullabies.

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What was discovered? The babies that were sung to demonstrated an improved development of sucking abilities, A measurable improvement in weight gain and an earlier discharge from the hospital, simply from the power of song. People with Parkinson's disease, who have lost significant amounts of motor control, are able to move to music

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in ways that approximate the natural fluidity of the movement they had before they got sick. Because there is something about the rhythmic power of music that enters the motor pathways of the brain and synchronizes their movement in such a way that it restores them to a little bit of their former grace. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, you know Oliver Sacks' work, the man who wrote, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, you know that book, and has recently come out with a book called Musicophilia. He has discovered that people with aphasia, people who could no longer voice propositional phrases because they have frontal lobe damage or some form of dementia, they can't speak, but they can still chant.

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And they can sing. They can daven, they're Jewish. They can pray in that rhythmic, incantatory mode because there's something about the way that words are processed through music that is different from the way speech is processed alone. So that people who suffer from the significant dementia of Alzheimer's can still often sing.

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Sacks writes about a man named Woody. a man with Alzheimer's disease, who had sung in symphony choruses all his life, and even when he had Alzheimer's and could not remember the names of people near and dear to him, all of these words were still in him. Finding that he can sing, Sachs writes, is profoundly reassuring to Woody. It can give him back to himself, and not least, it can charm others.

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arouse their amazement and admiration, reactions more and more necessary to someone who, in his lucid moments, is painfully aware of his disease and says that he feels broken inside. For the moments when he's singing, he's not broken anymore. In an essay in Christian Century, published nearly 20 years ago, Sarah Miller, writes about her mother, age 86, who for five years had been unable to give family members any sign that she knew who they were.

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And yet the family continued to go and visit her and to bring her to their homes for family gatherings. And so there was a gathering on New Year's Day, and they brought their mother from the nursing home and put her in her wheelchair and strapped her in so that she wouldn't fall out and wheeled her to the piano. And the whole family gathered around the piano and began singing from an old book of hymns. When they came to Silent Night, they could hardly believe their ears.

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Mom, who could not even talk, was singing too. Her verse was soft, but she was on key, and she knew the words. Amazed, they kept on singing.

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They smiled at her, and she nodded. They sang other carols and went on to some of her favorite hymns, Amazing Grace. What a friend we have in Jesus, Holy, holy, holy, which we sang here last night. She sang them all.

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It was a moment of incredible warmth and joy. Even when she couldn't recognize the faces of her own children, even when she seemed incapable of speech or laughter or tears, the songs of faith were still alive in her. Now, there is a new diagnosis of Alzheimer's every 72 seconds in this country. It is a health care crisis, not simply for the people who have Alzheimer's, but for their loved ones and family members who try to cope with someone who can no longer recognize them and who deal with the innervating process of trying to provide care.

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Several years ago, my closest friend was dealing with her mother, who was in the late stages of Alzheimer's disease, and whose father, as the primary caregiver, was just flat out exhausting. And there was not much that I could do for my friend under the circumstances, but I wrote a hymn text for her, and I'd like for us to look at that and sing it together. It's on the front of your handout, the top right-hand column, When Memory Fades. The structure of this hymn in the first stanza talks about our human memories which fade.

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In the second stanza, it talks about our human arms, which weaken and grow weary. But in the third stanza, affirms that God's memory never fades, but holds us eternally, even as God's everlasting arms eternally bear us up. You'll recognize the tune, I've set this to Finlandia, let's sing all three stanzas together, please. They want to stand.

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No valued deed will ever be undone. No act of kindness, however trivial it seems, will ever be undone. No gesture of caring, however little difference it seems to make in the moment, will ever be undone. But all of those things are held eternally in the mind and heart of God.

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Now, I can't help but wonder, friends, what are the songs that our children and grandchildren are going to know well enough that they can sing with us around the piano? And is that not one of the most personally compelling reasons to do exactly what Paul Westermar has been telling us we should do? We must teach the church's song or there will not be anything left for us to sing together when our memory fades and recognition falters. Which leads me to suspect that those of us who are sort of highfalutin in our church music taste should get over it.

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Because some of the songs that we might be able to sing together around the piano are the oldies but goodies. Those things that the church musician doesn't want to play at the prelude to your funeral because they're not Bach cantatas, well, my word. His Eyes on the Sparrow is something that my father used to play, Tennessee Ernie Ford records, singing, and I grew up with that in my ears, and I praise God for having that music as part of my history. Even if it is not profound theology, it is profound theology.

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It's not profound music, but it's very singable music and a precious part of the repertoire that we share as people of faith. Savilla Martin said this about writing the text, His Eye is on the Sparrow. She said, Early in the spring of 1905, my husband and I were sojourning in Elmira, New York. We contracted a deep friendship with a couple by the name of Mr.

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and Mrs. Doolittle, true saints of God. Mrs. Doolittle had been bedridden for nigh 20 years.

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Her husband was an incurable cripple who had to propel himself to and from his business in a wheelchair. Despite their afflictions, they lived happy Christian lives, bringing inspiration and comfort to all who knew them. One day, while we were visiting with the Doolittles, my husband commented on the bright hopefulness of their lives and asked them for the secret of it. Mrs.

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Doolittle's reply was simple, His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me. The beauty of this simple expression of boundless faith gripped the hearts and fired the imagination of my husband and me. The hymn, His Eyes on the Sparrow, is the outcome of that experience.

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Now, Mr. Doolittle's experience of needing a wheelchair for mobility points out to us that issues of physical ability and disability are not new pastoral care challenges in the church. But I suspect they are new ecclesiological challenges as we are just now beginning to figure out how to build our churches so that people in wheelchairs can get into them without having to go around to a back door. or get up in our chancels without, I'm not sure what.

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We are only beginning to realize issues of access in terms of our church architecture, and we're only really beginning to think about issues of ability and disability in terms of our theology. We are just now beginning to tap the resources of what it means to say, as Nancy Eastland does in her book, that God is a disabled God. That the God who rises from the grave on Easter morning is a God who still bears wounds in his hands inside. That the resurrected Lord is not some alabaster God with perfection embodied, but is a God who is disabled.

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willingly bearing our suffering even in resurrection. And there is something profound about that that we have not yet fully explored as theologians. We certainly have not explored it in our hymnody. But there's one hymn that I want to share with you this morning that makes a powerful beginning in that direction.

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It's on the bottom left-hand side of the front page of your handout called When Hands Reach Out by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. Carolyn wrote this hymn. She was commissioned to write it by First Presbyterian Church in Little Rock, Arkansas for a national conference on ability and disability. At the time that she wrote it, she and her husband, Bruce, were co-pastors of a church that was right next door to an ARC, an Associated for Retarded Children's home.

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And the residents of that home came regularly to worship, and a severely autistic young woman named Jessica Scanlon came and asked to be baptized in the church. So the whole church began thinking about issues of ability and disability. At the time of writing, Carolyn's mother-in-law had lost the hearing in one ear and was getting ready to lose it in the other, and father-in-law had gone blind in one eye.

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So she was really wrestling with what it means to bear physical limitations, and she wrote this text. When we sing it together, I would like for any of you who know anyone who is sight impaired to sing the first stanza, when hands reach out and fingers trace the beauty of a loved one's face. We thank you, God, that love relies on gifts of grace not seen with eyes. And anyone who knows someone who is hearing impaired, if you would sing stanza two.

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When fingers spell and signs express our prayer and praise and thankfulness, we thank you, God, that hands can sing. You bless the silent songs we bring. And if you know anyone who is learning disabled, who learns in some way that is different from the norm, if you would sing stanza three. And when the ways we learn and grow are not the ways that others know, we thank you, God, that we have learned your love's a gift and never earned.

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And we will all sing together the closing stanza. Your Spirit gives us differing ways to serve you well, and offer praise. When all are joined as one, we'll be your able, strong community.

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We'll sing this to O Wally Wally. So issues of ability and disability are our new pastoral care challenges for our theology and our hymnody. Issues of Alzheimer's are new pastoral care challenges for our theology and our hymnody. Issues of AIDS are new pastoral care challenges for our theology and our hymnody.

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And just as we sing of a God who is disabled, who bears our pains even after the resurrection, so we sing in 21st century theology not of a God who, like the God of the Greeks, was impassable, beyond suffering and passion, but a God who is passable, a God who bears our pain. If you will look on the second page of your handout, you will see an extremely powerful affirmation of that and a hymn by Tom Troeger and Sally Ann Morris. Sally wrote this tune after she found that a close friend of hers had died of AIDS at age 39.

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The first time she's ever written a hymn tune without having words in her mind, but she just sat at the piano and dealt with her grief by playing until the tune emerged. She sent it to Tom Troeger, who, as it happened, was going to be preaching an AIDS memorial service that very weekend. And so he wrote text to the tune. Let me read you the first two stanzas, and we will sing the third one together.

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God weeps with us, who weep and mourn. God's tears flow down with ours. and God's own heart is bruised and worn from all the heavy hours of watching while the soul's bright fire burned lower day by day and pulse and breath and love's desire dimmed down to ash and clay. Through tears and sorrow, God, we share a sense of your vast grief.

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The weight of bearing every prayer for healing, and... and relief, the burden of our questions why, the doubts that they engage. And as our friends and lovers die, our hopelessness and rage. Stanza three.

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And yet because like And when you feel that last chord move from minor to major, there's something that happens. There is a resolution and a peace as we feel the resolution of our grief into a hope beyond hope. But Tom Troeger reminds us that we gain pastoral care from hymns, not just from singing our laments, our grief,

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But we also gain pastoral care from singing words of praise, from songs of triumph that remind us of the promises of God. Even when we can't quite believe them ourselves, the church around us continues to sing them and believe them for us until such a time as we can voice them from our own hearts again. John Whitfleet at Calvin College. quotes a wise pastoral musician who said that every week, as she led congregational singing, she was rehearsing the congregation for some future funeral.

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I wonder, he said, what would happen if we planned music with that as our primary goal? Because singing, among all the many things it is for us, is eschatological choir practice. It is our rehearsal to join that choir of creatures from the heavens and on earth and under the earth and in the sea who gather around the throne of the Lamb singing Alleluia, glory. So let us, as an eschatological choir of saints and sinners, stand and sing a closing hymn of triumph number 526 in your hymnals.

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Let us sing four stanzas of For All the Saints, 526. Amen.