Revelation 19:1-10 "The Rehearsal" Scott Hoezee

Every week, once or twice a Sunday, most of us trek over here to Calvin Church. We take our seats in this sanctuary and we do so knowing full well that before the hour is finished, we will have heard two or three songs sung by others even as we will have opened our mouths to sing about a half-dozen songs ourselves. We do this without being very curious about why we do it. We do this without reflecting much on what such music may do for us. And except for those times when Rev. Hoezee chooses a real dud of a hymn, we probably don't talk too much about the music after the service is finished, either.

In short, we fail to notice that in this day and age, the kind of singing we take for granted is a rare phenomenon. In fact, I think it would be really interesting if all of us who have non-churchgoing co-workers were to ask these folks tomorrow, "When was the last time you sang? When was the last time you sang with a group of people?" I would wager that we would discover that people who do not attend church almost never sing, or at least they never sing with other people. Other than solo performances like singing in the shower or singing along with the car radio, people do not get together to sing outside of a church.

But here in church we Christian folks do indeed sing. We place a high value on music, so much so that with little effort we can spark some pretty heated discussions on the subject. In the course of a year, I choose something on the order of 400 hymns. Probably 95% of those are familiar hymns we've sung for years. But once in a while I choose something that's new to us, and once in a while I choose a song that I discover (too late!) has an odd enough tune that I get every bit as lost as many of the rest of you do. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, nine times out of ten I hear about it! We care about what we sing and so are disappointed if we find that we cannot sing a given selection.

This morning we have pulled out the stops formally to launch the musical portion of our new church season. It is a good chance for us to celebrate the array of musical gifts with which God has showered us. But it is also a chance to reflect on the place and power of music within the worship life of the church. Why do we sing to God? Is it necessary or just a disposable option that we Christians could do without if we so chose? Let's spend a few minutes this morning pondering these issues.

We'll begin by noticing what is probably a fairly obvious, but still important, idea; namely, singing affects us very differently from ordinary speech. Indeed, there are patterns of language that work musically but that would fall flat if just spoken. Listen to what happens when I read these familiar words from a much-loved hymn: "When through the woods and forest glades I wander, I hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees. When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the brook, and feel the gentle breeze. Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee: how great thou art, how great thou art. Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee: how great thou art, how great thou art." It just doesn't quite grab you the way it does when you actually hear it set to music, does it? If I or any preacher attempted to duplicate the structure of hymn lyrics in sermons, you would likely find it highly strange, highly strange (!).

As John Witvliet points out in his new book Worship Seeking Understanding, singing (as opposed to just talking) is a fairly athletic activity that engages us on multiple levels at once. In singing we need to breathe differently and pay attention to our breathing. When we're talking in the narthex after the service, we rarely all of the sudden discover we are running out of air before our own sentence is finished. But if we are not attentive to the need to take breaths at the right moments, we will find that we run out of air when singing. It is an athletic-like activity that engages our whole body.

It is also a multivalent mental event in which we do as many as four things at once. We listen to notes from the organ, we match our voice to what we hear, we read the notes on the page, and fourthly we read the words or lyrics of the song itself. We have to breathe right, listen, read notes, read words, and then intone the right words on the right notes at the right time. It's a wonder we don't all just faint dead away every time we try to sing!

But we don't because we have been made in the image of God precisely so that we can sing and, what's more, sing to God! Our Creator God fashioned us in the beginning to be a unified whole as body and soul. Seldom are both body and soul, heart and mind, thoughts and emotions so completely engaged and unified as when we sing. Small wonder that as the Bible approaches its climax in the Book of Revelation, the singing mounts higher and higher. No New Testament book is as loaded with songs as Revelation. It is almost as though the closer we get to the final culmination of God's every wish for his redeemed creation, the more singing there is. It even looks as if just such singing is what the whole thing was supposed to have been about from the very beginning.

The Hebrew phrase hallelu yah pops up all over the place in the Old Testament, but the Greek transliteration of "hallelujah" occurs only four times in the New Testament and all four of them are right here in Revelation 19. Ironically, despite how famous this word is, the only four times you can find it in the entire NIV is in this chapter. All of the many occurrences of hallelu yah in the Old Testament have been translated as "Praise the LORD" and so in the NIV at least you do not read the actual word "hallelujah" in the Old Testament.

So it is only in Revelation 19 that we typically see this word, but there is no doubting the full-throated burst of praise that it represents here. The entire creation is coming together to sing and shout to God. With one voice they lyrically lift up the victory of God in Christ. Interestingly, a main item that gets celebrated here is the defeat of "the prostitute," who everywhere else in Revelation is identified as Babylon. Ever since the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, Babel or Babylon has represented the complete anti-God force of chaos that sin unleashed on the world. Babylon is confusion and seduction, a scattering of voices. As God confused the languages of the people who tried arrogantly to mount up to heaven by building that tower at Babel, so ever since Babylon has represented the very worst of relativism, a plurality of not just voices but also of disconnected ideas about God. Under the influence of the prostitute Babylon, people were divided, lacking any coherent center of meaning that could give life structure and purpose. In Babylon there was no one song that everyone could sing.

But then the Son of God came as God's One and Only, full of grace and truth as John told us in his gospel. This One created all the world in the first place and now by his life, death, and resurrection has reclaimed that world and so re-established a core, a center, a single shining Truth as to what life was supposed to have been about all along. And in Revelation 19, as that victory culminates once and for all in the re-assembling of all that had been scattered by sin, the whole creation roars forth in song.

Earlier I asked whether music and singing are necessary components to the worship of God or merely something conventional, and so disposable. Could the church one day decide to get rid of singing? I believe the answer is no. So long as we have the Holy Spirit lifting us closer to the presence of God, we will sing! Even if someone tried to outlaw singing, I think the Spirit would make music bubble up anyway. In the Book of Acts, the authorities ripped the apostles away from the church and tossed them into jail. But throughout the watches of the night, the sounds of singing wafted through the prison as Paul, Peter, Barnabus, Silas, and others found that persecution was not enough to shut off the flow of music that comes in response to the presence of God through the Holy Spirit.

When we sing, we let God fill up our whole frame, engulfing us totally in mind, body, spirit, and heart. As such, the very act of singing becomes a kind of living metaphor for the kind of complete dedication we should have toward our Creator and Redeemer God. It is a happy kind of vicious cycle: the more we sing, the closer we feel to God but the closer we feel to God, the more reason we have to sing! On and on it goes as the Holy Spirit wrings from our God-saturated hearts what John describes as a roar like rushing waters.

Music is one of the most powerful phenomena of which we know. There is good reason to be thoughtful about what we sing in church. Because of its wide-ranging effect on us, it may well be true that what we think of God and how we think of God will be shaped as much by the music we sing as by the sermons we hear or the creeds we recite. At graveside committal services, I've seldom seen people choke up when they recite the Apostles' Creed. But I cannot count the number of times I've watched people at a funeral unable to continue when we sing "By the Sea of Crystal" or "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." Even when I am about as poignant as I can get in a funeral sermon, what I see on the faces of family members are mostly looks of concentration and appreciation. But at the end of the funeral when Ken Bos cuts loose with the "Hallelujah Chorus," chins all over the sanctuary are set aquivering.

Music touches us and instructs us and forms us. In the coming nine months of this still-new church season, we will both hear and sing a lot of music. We should thank God for the abundant gifts he has given our congregation as we see those gifts being thoughtfully implemented in our various choirs. Some of us, of course, are not particularly gifted musically. We are in no position to render anything like a well-informed opinion on other people's musical abilities and we sense that we are usually a half-note out-of-tune when we sing ourselves, too. But even the least musical person here can and does sing. This, too, is a wonderful gift of God. But then, it is precisely because of God's multitude of gifts, climaxing with the gift of Christ Jesus himself, that we feel motivated to sing in the first place. To not sing in the face of such a grand and gracious God is merely baffling.

But even the most gifted musician in the world can in this life make only a small beginning. As C.S. Lewis memorably wrote, for now on this earth we can but tune our instruments for the symphony of praise yet to come. Our worship services now are just the wedding rehearsal. The great marriage feast of the Lamb is still to come. But when it does, every voice will cry out "Hallelujah!" Thanks be to God that through our worship now, we can rehearse and so know for sure that on that great and coming day we will all of us be in good voice! Amen.