00:00:07.460 - 00:00:27.220

Before I introduce Dr. Bringle to Austin Seminary again, I would like to remind you that there is a handout for this lecture. If you do not have one, there are plenty of copies up here and in the narthex of the chapel. Mary Louise Bringle has already touched us with her words and her song.

00:00:28.500 - 00:00:50.420

Yesterday, we heard of her contributions to church and academy as writer, scholar, committee servant, and hymnodist. Yesterday, we heard Dr. Bringle focus on the hymns of the church as they provide pastoral care, as they heal and provide consolation to the people of God in the midst of struggle.

00:00:51.540 - 00:01:13.460

After that lecture, a colleague and I reflected on how thoroughly interdisciplinary Dr. Bringle's work is. how it interweaves theology, psychology, music, and biblical reflection. That ability to converse across disciplines, to be sure, is one of the gifts she brings to the church.

00:01:14.420 - 00:01:44.820

It's a voice that reminds us, no matter what our vocation, whether preacher, teacher, administrator, or student, that we are never alone. Song, perhaps more than anything else in life, also reminds us that we are never alone. Whenever we sing, we are drawn into the company of others. Perhaps that is part of what being a person in God's creation means.

00:01:45.540 - 00:01:56.180

To be a human being is to sing. Dr. Bringle's lecture this morning is entitled Hymns as Prophetic Witness. Welcome to Austin Seminary, Dr.

00:01:56.180 - 00:02:19.150

Bringle. We are eager to learn from you and sing with you again. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. I hope that whoever is taping these things has recorded the introductions.

00:02:19.500 - 00:02:35.060

because my mother would really love to hear them. And I'm always so focused on what I'm about to say that I can't, and it feels odd to take notes on an introduction to yourself anyway. So if they're recorded, this would be just a great, lovely Christmas gift. to my mother.

00:02:36.660 - 00:02:55.460

You've done my shopping for me. It's wonderful to be back with you again, and thanks for the introduction, and thanks also to Kevin, who's going to be accompanying for us again today. You know that you just did something counter-cultural. In terms of the content of what you sang,

00:02:56.420 - 00:03:14.580

That Negro spiritual calls into account the Pharaohs of its day. It is a counter-cultural text. It goes back to 1831, at least. Some people ascribe it to Nat Turner, the leader of the great slave revolt in Virginia.

00:03:14.820 - 00:03:34.580

Others say, well, no, he didn't write it. But the Moses that people have in mind, or had in mind originally singing it, was Nat Turner going down, telling old Pharaoh to the slaves go. You know, a lot of the spirituals had coded countercultural meanings.

00:03:34.900 - 00:03:56.020

That one, for example, Harriet Tubman used to use when she was running the Underground Railroad. And when she would go by a plantation and the slaves were waiting to come out to go toward freedom, they would sing the stanza that you sang. But if the coast was not clear, she improvised a new stanza.

00:03:56.500 - 00:04:23.940

If it hadn't been for Adam's fall, we wouldn't have had to have died at all. And if she sang those words, then the slaves knew the coast was not clear, and they stayed in hiding for a while longer. There was a former slave whose name was Joshua McCarter Simpson. who escaped from slavery and became a free man in Ohio, and in 1854, put together a book of anti-slavery ballads.

00:04:24.700 - 00:04:57.860

And in the introduction to that volume, he wrote this incredible line, You can sing what would be death to speak. You can sing what would be death to speak. Singing carries a powerful prophetic witness. In fact, that particular song that you sang, Go Down Moses, became such a powerful prophetic witness that ultimately the slave masters forbade its singing on the plantation.

00:04:59.460 - 00:05:26.500

But you also just did something counter-cultural in terms not of content, but of process. How counter to our culture is it for a group of adults to get together and sing? Now, in the earlier days of our culture, it happened all the time. You would not have a social gathering without people joining in song together.

00:05:27.060 - 00:05:53.020

But I warrant that in our culture now, church, is just about the only place that untrained musicians, on a regular basis, make music together. That is a counter-cultural thing. We could talk, if we had time, about why it is that music in our culture has shifted from being a participant activity to a spectator sport.

00:05:53.700 - 00:06:25.700

But let me just say a couple of things about that. One is, I think, when music started to be written down and printed, we gradually started losing the oral-aural transmission and began transmitting it through print such that it became a specialized skill. So people who didn't read music began to feel left out of the loop. And I imagine that when you have people in your congregation saying, Oh, I don't sing,

00:06:26.500 - 00:06:37.980

They don't mean they don't sing. They mean they don't read music. Well, so what? You know, for generations, people learned song through the ear, and it didn't matter whether they could read at all.

00:06:37.980 - 00:07:07.300

And in cultures all over the world, people sing through the ear, not through the eye. One of the best things I ever heard when I was first starting my work as a hymn writer, which has led to my work as an apologist for hymnody, I heard Brian Wren give a talk. And Brian Wren said, People learn music better if they hear it sung by someone with a very average voice.

00:07:08.420 - 00:07:23.140

Hallelujah. That was so empowering to me. Because if people hear you singing something with a lyric soprano voice, they think, Oh, I can't do that. But they hear you singing it with your very garden variety voice.

00:07:23.140 - 00:07:39.940

They say, oh, heck, I can do that. And then they will join in the song. And I think we have lost the sense of participation in song because we have created such a cult of the professionals who sing and record. And if we don't sound like them, we think we shouldn't sing at all.

00:07:40.180 - 00:07:56.060

And God bless the church that it still lets those of us with very average voices get together and sing. Because we lose a lot when we lose corporate song. Oh, you're nodding good. I'm preaching to the choir.

00:07:56.060 - 00:08:18.340

I love preaching to the choir. We lose all of those health benefits that I mentioned to you yesterday. individual health benefits, we also lose corporate health when we stop singing together. Stephen Mithen has written an extraordinary book called The Singing Neanderthals.

00:08:18.900 - 00:08:55.860

It's in your bibliography from yesterday, and he's tracing the evolution of song in our hominid ancestors and maintains that we learned to sing a long time before we learned to speak. And he says that singing was a way of forging intra-group cooperation. So that the group that sat around the campfire and harmonized together created a sense of communal trust that then enabled them to survive on the hunt and in society. So singing forged intra-group bonds.

00:08:56.180 - 00:09:47.620

Singing together builds social capital. There have been studies done that have shown that choral singers are more likely than non-choral singers. People who sing in groups are more likely than non-singers to volunteer their time or to donate their money to charity, and are more than twice as likely as non-singers to be aware of current events or to vote. When people sing together, it forges social capital, such that Robert Putnam, who works at Harvard in the Kennedy School of Government, has said, Choral singing creates the social trust necessary to foster civic engagement and democratic culture.

00:09:48.900 - 00:10:17.620

Robert Putnam is the man who wrote several years ago the book Bowling Alone that talked about the privatization of our culture and then has come out with a later book called Better Together. And one of the things he advocates is the power of communal singing to build the social capital that will create a democratic culture. Or if you'd rather look from a theological lens than an anthropological or a sociological lens, here's Brian Wren. As we sing together, he says,

00:10:18.340 - 00:10:51.460

We agree to compromise with each other, to listen to each other, to keep the same tempo. Singing together reminds us that we are not a crowd, a mob, a swarm, a flock, not a chance agglomeration of individuals, but a unified body of Christ. When we sing, we become a community. Now, the spirituals of the slavery era did that.

00:10:51.540 - 00:11:27.620

They give us profound examples of how singing together forged a kind of corporate identity that enabled people to surmount their circumstances and to change the world. We have many other examples that spring to mind of ways in which singing together has built the kind of communal identity and strength that has been able to change the world. And the one that leaps to consciousness is, of course, the Civil Rights era, which was fueled by song, by spirituals.

00:11:27.620 - 00:11:34.260

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. We shall overcome. Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.

00:11:34.340 - 00:12:00.100

Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom. Those songs brought people together and gave them the courage to surmount very, very difficult circumstances. And they didn't just forge an identity for people inside the group, but they began to woo and seduce and persuade and convert people on the outside.

00:12:01.220 - 00:12:38.980

Such that Robert Branham and Steven Hartnett, in a book called Sweet Freedom's Song, say that musical messages weave their way into consciousness, infiltrating prejudice, melting anger and nudging the listener or the singer toward the willingness to consider new ideas, new images, new possibilities. We will sing what it might be death to speak. We will sing what we may not quite yet be able to speak.

00:12:39.700 - 00:12:59.060

But through the process of singing it, the ideas will seep down into us and shape us in ways that we will be able to speak. Singing is prophetic witness. But it wasn't just the spirituals. that animated the Civil Rights Movement.

00:12:59.220 - 00:13:16.340

Hymn texts animated that movement as well. One hymn in particular that became almost a mantra for Martin Luther King, Jr. And you are going to know what it is. He used it in his I Have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

00:13:16.980 - 00:13:41.180

He used it in his How Long, Not Long speech on the steps of the State House in Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. He used it in the last speech of his life that he ever gave before being assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. How long must we wait for justice? Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

00:13:41.180 - 00:14:21.900

Let's sing one stanza of that. You don't need words, you know this by heart. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. Oh, you've got to stand! The grace around our sword He hath loose the faithful Glory, glory, hallelujah Glory, glory, hallelujah

00:14:31.900 - 00:14:54.700

Glory, glory, hallelujah, is true, is watching all. Amen. Amen. Now, you know how galvanizing that message was for people in civil rights.

00:14:54.740 - 00:15:28.860

God's truth is marching on, and so we will go march with it, even in the face of those fire hoses that are turned on us to try to turn us around. God's truth is marching on, and we will march in the vanguard with it. And what you may not know is that that song was used to galvanize social justice movements a hundred years before Martin Luther King ever used it. It began its life in the 1850s as a camp meeting song, which was something like, Say brothers, will you meet us?

00:15:28.860 - 00:15:38.020

Say brothers, will you meet us? Say brothers, will you meet us on Canaan's happy shore? Say sisters, will you meet? I mean, they knew about inclusivity.

00:15:38.420 - 00:15:51.780

then. They got the sisters in there as well. And that tune was so infectious that it was picked up as a Union Army marchy song. John Brown's body, Liza Boulder in the grave, John Brown's body.

00:15:51.780 - 00:16:12.420

And Julia Ward Howe was with her husband outside of Washington, D.C. in 1861, and she saw the troops marshaling, and they were singing that song, and somebody said to her, You know, Julia, that's a great tune. It needs better words. And so she went back to her hotel room that night, and she wrote down the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

00:16:13.700 - 00:16:47.260

Now, Julia Ward Howe's husband did not like for her to speak in public. When her husband died, she discovered a whole new vocation. take heart, my friends, my sisters, my dear ones, she discovered a whole new vocation as an advocate for women's rights. She became president of the American Woman Suffrage Association.

00:16:48.100 - 00:17:08.180

And when that group would gather, what did they sing? They sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic. When the International Women's Conference met in Washington, D.C., 1888, bringing women from all over the world to talk about social justice issues and suffrage for women, what did they sing? The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

00:17:08.820 - 00:17:35.700

Now, that tune and text were so liberating and empowering that pretty soon people began writing new texts to the same tune to get even more directly at the social justice issues of the day. There are-- I do not exaggerate-- hundreds of them. I've given you three examples on your handout. Julia Mills Dunn, 1884.

00:17:36.500 - 00:18:02.660

writing directly for suffrage. From Wyoming's rocky valleys to the wild New Hampshire hills, from our northern lakes of silver to the sunny southern rills, lo, the clarion call of freedom, all the listening silence thrills, our God shall lead us on. We have heard the voice of freedom from that far off western shore. We have heard the echoes calling as our fathers heard of yore.

00:18:03.140 - 00:18:38.420

let us sing its stirring music equal rights for ever more and God will lead us on 1884 friends we have watched the dawning Splendor of a promise in the skies we have heard his accents tender low ye faithful ones arise who would equal Justice render our I will never more despise your God shall lead you on. Again, the march toward freedom and justice with God leading us and we follow, fueled by the power of song. Now, did you get the allusion to Wyoming?

00:18:39.540 - 00:18:55.940

From Wyoming's rocky valleys. Because Wyoming granted women the vote in 1869. The first place in this country women had state suffrage in Wyoming as early as 1869. So there's a wonderful story about Susan B.

00:18:55.940 - 00:19:12.260

Anthony, the great leader of the cause for women's suffrage, who was friends with the governor of Wyoming, and he sent her a telegram. to say that a mutual friend had just given birth. And Susan B. Anthony wrote him back and said, That's wonderful, congratulate the family for me.

00:19:12.500 - 00:19:40.660

You didn't say whether it was a boy or a girl. And he wrote her back and said, It doesn't matter, we're in Wyoming. Well, suffrage, a cause for which hymns voiced a prophetic witness. And very closely twined with that throughout the 19th century was the cause of temperance.

00:19:41.540 - 00:20:10.500

Now, we may laugh a little bit about that today, but you have to realize that in the culture of the early 19th century, water wasn't always safe to drink. And people drank a lot of alcohol. I mean, per capita consumption of alcohol in the early 1800s was double what it is today. Nearly four gallons per person per year of 200 proof alcohol.

00:20:12.940 - 00:20:35.620

I mean, even you guys over here would find that to be a bit much. There is much finger pointing going on for those of you in the balcony. And there were social problems, as you can imagine, associated with this. particularly domestic violence.

00:20:36.580 - 00:21:00.500

The lives of women with alcoholic husbands were a serious problem. And so part of the initiative to get the vote for women was to say, if women have the vote, then they will help to vote liquor out, at least hard liquor. I mean, there wasn't so much to do about wine and beer, but at least the 200 proof stuff, there will be laws to regulate it. So a temperance text.

00:21:01.180 - 00:21:15.700

Fill the ranks with voters and be ready for the fray. For the only battle is upon election day. Liquor folks would like to have us try some other way as we go marching on. Yes, the liquor folks proclaim that license is the best.

00:21:16.100 - 00:21:41.500

But where we've tried it, it has never stood the test. So we'll give the license scheme where we can a rest as we go marching on. This is the salient verse. Ah, if if the ballot box the mother could be heard, how the hearts of suffering ones with gladness would be stirred, how the feeble wail would cease and triumph be the word, and we'd go marching home.

00:21:43.180 - 00:22:03.700

A hymn text used as a prophetic witness for the temperance movement. I have counted no fewer than 34 temperance texts set to the tune of John Brown's body. Or the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Same tune.

00:22:04.340 - 00:22:36.980

This group of women of color who, after emancipation, began working for higher education for people of color, began working for reform of correctional institutions, because it is not just in our own day that it is people of color who are disproportionately the people who occupy our prison system. who worked hard for anti-lynching laws. And what did they sing when they got together? We represent the women who were once denied a place in the National Convention of the Highly Favored Race.

00:22:38.020 - 00:22:50.580

Nothing daunted, we have struggled, and we've made ourselves a place. Our motto, deeds, not words. Deeds, not words, shall be our motto. Deeds, not words.

00:22:50.660 - 00:23:15.860

And here I can't help but thinking that they are tweaking some of the white women's groups who said, yes, yes, yes, we support women's suffrage, but we just assume you not march with us, please, because the Southerners will never support the amendment if you do. And the colored women say, hey, our motto, deeds, not just lip service to equality. Our race must be enlightened. We must earn our daily bread.

00:23:15.860 - 00:23:32.180

We must give our time and talent, and the hungry must be fed. We must root up all old sadness, planting good and joy instead. Our motto, deeds, not words. All hail the Federation, and may others join our band.

00:23:32.580 - 00:24:10.020

May the torch that we have lighted shine in this and every land, till the women of all races will be glad to take our hand. Our motto, deeds, not words. A powerful text that was used for causes of racial justice as well as gender justice at the end of the 19th century. Well, where else in the world, where in our world are we continuing to use hymns as prophetic witness?

00:24:10.420 - 00:24:33.980

as ways to bind groups together and get them to sing what they might not yet be able to speak, or get them to sing what it might be death to speak. South Africa. I mean, you know how important and powerful freedom songs were in marching against apartheid in South Africa.

00:24:35.460 - 00:25:14.660

Latin America. There is an incredible text, song, written by Pablo Sosa that was written to protest the disappeared. You know that during the military junta in Argentina, 30,000 people, 30,000 people were rounded up, taken from their homes in the middle of the night and never heard from again. Most of them, it was discovered later, were put on military transport planes in Buenos Aires, flown out over the ocean, and dropped from a height of 13,000 feet.

00:25:16.340 - 00:25:33.860

Now, what do you say in the face of an injustice like that? Well, you may not be able to say anything, but sometimes you can sing, and Pablo Sosa wrote a song for a march And the lyrics are on your sheet. We won't sing it.

00:25:33.860 - 00:25:59.620

But there is a refrain that goes, Hold on and never give in. Throw all your fears to the wind, join hands and hearts to the end, and let's march on. So in Latin America, music has been used for a cause of social justice. In Uganda, there is an incredible book, and it is listed on your bibliography from yesterday,

00:26:00.100 - 00:26:23.860

by Gregory Barz, B-A-R-Z. Gregory Barz is a professor at Vanderbilt University. And he calls his discipline medical ethnomusicology. What he does is to study the way that music is used for social healing in other cultures.

00:26:24.980 - 00:27:04.900

He was in Uganda. And he discovered that there were these women's groups in Uganda that traveled around from village to village singing songs about AIDS awareness, singing songs about getting a blood test, singing songs about being faithful in relationship or using proper precautions. And these things that could not be said in the public square could be sung, and the stigma about getting an AIDS test suddenly began to evaporate because it was being sung about.

00:27:05.220 - 00:27:38.340

And the percentage of HIV infection has dropped from 30% to 5% over the past decade because people are singing this prophetic witness. Songs build communal capital, they foster social trust, and they change the world. In our own culture, there are issues that we still have reason to sing about for prophetic witness.

00:27:40.180 - 00:28:08.580

In January of this year, there was an article in the New York Times, the headline of which was, If This Isn't Slavery, What Is? Calling for a new abolition movement to outlaw human trafficking. We know that this is the third largest source of income for organized crime in the world, after drugs and weapons.

00:28:09.060 - 00:28:54.180

The sale of human beings, mostly children and women, is a huge source of income for organized crime. Estimated 800,000 sex workers bought and sold annually, over half of them children. Between 50,000 and 100,000 in this country, in the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave, between 50 and 100,000 people sold into slavery, working in sweatshops, working in domestic servitude, and working in prostitution.

00:28:54.900 - 00:29:24.660

This is an enormous problem. Now Paul Westermeyer said yesterday, and I'm so grateful he said this, that hymnody functions to the glory of God and for the edification of the people. And some of our social justice texts may not sound as if they are glorifying God, but their purpose is to edify the people, to educate, to raise consciousness and awareness. of situations in our world.

00:29:25.780 - 00:29:39.940

So a couple of years ago, I was asked to write a hymn about human trafficking. And I confess, I knew very little about human trafficking at the time. So I did what anybody does. I went online and I googled human trafficking.

00:29:40.420 - 00:30:12.420

And I pulled up a website, and the banner headline on that website was, Deliver them from evil. And I thought, that will sing. so I wrote the text that you find on the bottom of the first page of your handout Abba deliver them from evil children exploited and abused, sold into lives of pain and peril by lust and greed, betrayed and bruised.

00:30:13.300 - 00:30:34.660

Amah, in mercy, hear our prayer. Save these, your children, from despair. Abba, deliver them from evil, women compelled to walk the street, captive in sweatshops bound in brothels, victims of violence and deceit.

00:30:35.980 - 00:31:00.100

Amma in mercy, hear our prayer. Save these, your children, from despair. Abba, deliver us from evil, people who shield our ears and eyes, failing to see a world so hostile, failing to hear its anguished cries. Amma in mercy, hear our prayer.

00:31:00.500 - 00:34:30.260

save all your children from despair this is set to the tune Verno der Liebengot which you will know as if thou but suffer God to guide thee may I ask the women to sing stanza one men stanza two and all of us stanza three it's the parallel Abba father I'm a mother Women. There's a very different kind of despair that is felt by someone who is a victim of trafficking and by us for whom that reality is so remote. And yet, it seemed to me important in writing that text to ask that we, too, be delivered from despair because despair is an invitation to inaction.

00:34:31.460 - 00:35:07.380

And if we look at the world and say, Oh, that's just so awful, then we can be seduced into a kind of throwing up our hands, which is sinful. Ignorance of a problem and inactivity regarding a problem are complicity with the problem. Now I hadn't, when I originally sent my list of things that I wanted to use with this workshop, I hadn't thought about using this next text. And then I paid more attention to the schedule, and I saw that Carol Pickett and At the Death House Door were going to be part of the program.

00:35:07.540 - 00:35:39.380

And as Paul said in his remarks this morning, there has been this providential confluence of themes and images across his remarks and my remarks and Tom Long's remarks and if you saw that film yesterday. Also the kind of social justice witness through the power of congregational song that Carroll uses with inmates in prisons who sing together as a way of re-establishing a sense of dignity and self-worth.

00:35:40.580 - 00:36:36.940

The text that I thought afterward to send, you will find on the back of your second page, Your gentle rain falls on the just and unjust. This is a text that I was commissioned to write by Tallahassee Concerned Citizens Against the Death Penalty. this group of people in Tallahassee Florida who protest capital punishment gather in vigils outside the penitentiary before someone is to be executed and they wanted something that they could sing as part of their vigil and they asked if I could take a prayer by Sister Helen Prejean and turn it into a hymn so this is her prayer it's in the box on your handout God of compassion You let your rain fall on the just and the unjust.

00:36:38.340 - 00:37:17.220

Expand and deepen our hearts so that we may love as you love, even those among us who have caused the greatest pain by taking life. For there is in our land a great cry for vengeance as we fill up death row and kill the killers in the name of justice, in the name of peace. Jesus, our brother, you suffered execution at the hands of the state, but you did not let hatred overcome you. Help us to reach out to the victims of violence so that our enduring love may help them heal.

00:37:18.580 - 00:37:47.380

Holy Spirit of God, you strengthen us in the work for justice. Help us to work tirelessly for the abolition of state-sanctioned death. and to renew our society in its very heart so that violence will be no more. Now you notice the Trinitarian structure of that prayer that echoes some of what Paul Westermeyer was talking about this morning of the Trinitarian structure of so much of our hymnody.

00:37:50.140 - 00:38:18.540

Because this is to be sung at a vigil by untrained singers, perhaps even unaccompanied, I set it to a very, very simple folk melody that my choir over here recognizes as Sweet Betsy from Pike. You recognize that? Yeah.

00:38:18.900 - 00:38:34.540

So we're just going to sing it, and as you pick up the melody, you join in. If we could just have a nice little C major chord back there from the organ. OK, good. Your gentle rain falls on the just and unjust.

00:38:35.460 - 00:38:59.540

You love us no matter what wrong we have done. So teach us what is this, compassion and trust, till our hearts like yours learn to love everyone. Now, I don't mean to be critical. But this is just gentle and flowing and you're singing it.

00:39:00.420 - 00:39:30.180

So let's just sort of flow gently with the spirit. A hunger for vengeance is spread through our lands Yet how can we worship with blood on our hands For vengeance is yours, yours alone to repay Lord, help us to listen and humbly obey. Let's just move to the second stanza.

00:39:30.900 - 00:39:54.540

Your son and our brother was killed by the state. Yet Jesus stayed faithful, refusing hate. In all of the victims of violence and sin, You weep as our nails crucify Him again.

00:39:55.220 - 00:40:29.300

Stanza three. Come down, Holy Spirit, in power I will To work without tiring this dream to fulfill That death row be empty, that killings all seeps We as your children abide in your refrain. Your gentle rain falls on the chest and unjust.

00:40:29.780 - 00:40:55.540

You love us no matter what wrong we have done. So we just forgive this compassion and trust. Do I expect this hymn to be in the new Presbyterian Hymnal? No, I don't.

00:40:56.980 - 00:41:06.980

Does this hymn have potential usefulness? Yes, it does. Does our denomination have a stand against capital punishment?

00:41:07.700 - 00:41:45.380

Yes, it does. 1959, 1977, 1978, 1985, the PCUSA has articulated a powerful prophetic witness against killing the killers in the name of justice. There is, I think, a role for hymns that will never make it into the hymnal. I was asked last spring by Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont to write them a hymn, but they had some rather unusual constraints for it.

00:41:46.900 - 00:42:28.980

They have an environmental mission and they wanted a hymn on environmental themes that their non-religious students could sing. Now it's a church that, it's a college founded by the United Methodist Church But their church affiliation is so loose and weak that there are very, very few United Methodists on that campus. And they wanted a hymn that would honor their Methodist heritage by being a hymn, but would also bring in the happy tree-hugging pagans, and the Wiccans, and the pseudo-Native American spirituality folks, and the Hindus and the Buddhists, something that everyone could sing together, and I thought, Well, that's an interesting challenge.

00:42:36.180 - 00:43:07.380

So I wrote them a text that you will find on the back of the first page of your handout, called Can You Feel the Seasons Turning? This is a text about climate change. I don't know of that many hymns yet that have been written on the issue of climate change. Can you feel the seasons turning, winds and waves grown wild and strange?

00:43:08.340 - 00:43:25.540

Can you feel creation groaning, fearful of the coming change? Ice caps melting, oceans rising, homes and habitations lost. Can you feel the seasons turning? Can you count the bitter cost?

00:43:26.820 - 00:43:46.340

Can you hear the creatures crying, lynx and otter, wolf and whale. Can you hear the spirit sighing as her children grieve and fail? Nature's poor, the first to suffer, pay the price of human greed.

00:43:47.220 - 00:44:27.860

Can you hear the creatures crying, bidding us to stop and heed? Can you feel the season turning as an age of listening starts, tuned to cries of deepest yearning, changing minds and lives and hearts? Sisters, brothers, all one family, reaching out through time and space, can you feel the seasons turning toward the tender green of grace? There's a Welsh heritage program at Green Mountain College, so in writing a hymn for them, I chose a Welsh tune.

00:44:27.860 - 00:44:48.900

It may not be one that you know. It's called Llansannen, and it has this almost tension yearning in it that you feel the winds and waves growing wild and strange. Let's try singing this. Kevin will play it through for us once, then if we could have men on stanza one, women on stanza two, and all on stanza three.

00:45:26.380 - 00:48:00.900

Amen. Women. You know, the one line in Barack Obama's inaugural address for which he got the most flack was when he said, We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers. And Christian clergy slammed him for that comment

00:48:01.300 - 00:48:19.140

And yet, there are 16.1% of us in this country who are non-believers. Does that mean we can't sing together? Now, if hymnody is praise to God, as St. Augustine said, then there may be limits because we name God differently or may not name God at all.

00:48:19.780 - 00:49:03.380

But as hymnody is also for edification of humanity, as Paul Westermeyer said. then can't we for a moment put our theological differences aside so that we can sing together to forge the communal bonds that will enable us to build the social capital that we need to change the world before it is too late? Hymnody can serve the purpose of that kind of prophetic witness in a song voice that we can share when we may not be able to share our theology. I think it is very important for hymns to address the social issues of our day.

00:49:04.500 - 00:49:26.820

And I think this is so for a couple of reasons. Among other things, it saves the genre of hymnody itself from irrelevance. I was invited to speak at a church in Charlotte, North Carolina a couple of summers ago when I did a hymn writing workshop and the youth of the congregation attended it as well. Afterwards, one young man came up to me and said, You know, this is very interesting.

00:49:26.820 - 00:49:49.460

I thought hymns were only written by dead people. And there is a danger. If we do not address the issues of our day, the genre of hymnody will be something that we relegate to the past as stuff written by dead people and sung by people who are on their way very fast. But I also think

00:49:50.820 - 00:50:16.980

that writing hymns on contemporary social issues saves us from a far worse peril than irrelevance. I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. You can hear it. In the 1950s and '60s, which was the era of the Civil Rights Movement, 49 years ago this past Sunday, February 1st, 1969,

00:50:17.620 - 00:50:57.700

A group of students from A&T State University went and sat down at the lunch counter in Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, and asked for a cup of coffee. That had a powerful impact on me as a child. And I remember reading, as I was a teenager, words of Martin Luther King, Jr. where he said, The greatest evil for which we will have to repent in this time of social transition is not the vitriolic words and deeds of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

00:50:59.220 - 00:51:28.900

If we do not write and sing about the compelling social issues of our day, we are guilty of the appalling silence of the good people. And I cannot be complicit in that anymore. And so I must write texts about the inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, omnisexual people as people of full dignity in the heart of God and the life of the church. I have to write those texts.

00:51:29.060 - 00:52:05.620

If I don't, if I don't write them and you don't sing them, we are guilty of the appalling silence of the good people. We need texts that will affirm the equal dignity and worth of all God's children, gay, straight, male, female, incarcerated, or at loose in the world. And we need those texts that will call us to make the significant lifestyle changes that we will have to make if there is to be economic justice in our world and if there is be environmental sustainability.

00:52:06.660 - 00:52:25.300

We need those texts. We will close by singing a text that I hope moves us in that direction. You sang it once yesterday. I would like for you to sing again today, understanding a little more of the context of Light Dawns on a Weary World.

00:52:26.180 - 00:52:52.820

You have words and music in your handout. This is a text I wrote when the composer William Rowan played the tune for me. And I heard the tune and I fell in love with the tune, and the tune sounded to me like a watered garden. And so I went to scripture, to those passages that I know speak about a watered garden, in the section of Isaiah.

00:52:53.740 - 00:53:30.980

where the people in captivity in Babylon are about to be set loose to go home, and the prophet says, You will go out in joy and be led forth with singing. The hills and mountains before you will rejoice, and the trees will clap their hands, and wilderness will spring with fountains to water your way. And so that Isaiah 55 is at the heart of this text. And then it very simply affirms that light will dawn when we celebrate the dignity of all people, when we see that all people have food, and when we tend the creation.

00:53:32.100 - 00:53:51.300

When we write and sing these texts, if we do it well enough, with passion enough, We will have the power to change the world and light will dawn and justice will arise. Will you stand and sing?