... Come into God's Courts with Thanksgiving!
Don Friesen
Some three centuries ago international travel was not as common as now, and the stories told by those who ventured far were of great interest to a great many people. One such story appeared in 1710, in The Tatler, written by Joseph Addison (1672-1719). "There are no books which I more delight in than in travels, especially those that describe remote countries," he wrote, and then went on to tell of one such visit to a very cold country.
There, he writes, "we soon observed, that in talking to one another we lost several of our words.... After much perplexity, I found that our words froze in the air before they could reach the ears of the person to whom they were spoken. ...upon the increase of the cold, the whole company grew dumb, or rather deaf; for every man was sensible, as we afterwards found, that he spoke as well as ever; but the sounds no sooner took air, than they were condensed and lost. ... We continued ...three weeks in this dismal plight. At length, upon a turn of wind, the air about us began to thaw. Our cabin was immediately filled with a dry clattering sound, which I afterwards found to be the crackling of consonants that broke above our heads.... These were soon followed by syllables and short words, and at length by entire sentences, that melted sooner or later, ...so that we now heard everything that had been spoken ...three weeks (earlier)...." ("Frozen Voices," Tatler, November 23, 1710)
Addison went on, telling of the many other sounds that added to a cacophony of noise — the posthumous snarls and barkings of a fox, for example, as well as the belated conversation of some Dutch comrades, "the harsh and obdurate sounds of that language," he writes, needing more time to melt and become audible.
The Blaring Noise of Arrogance and War
Addison's satiric essay is a delightful variation of the biblical story of chaos and confusion at the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). The Bible invites us to make a joyful noise (Psalm 98) in times of celebration, but as a rule noise is considered an unwelcome sound in the Scriptures. Isaiah 34, for example, is a vivid description of hell-on-earth, when normally tranquil scenes are run over by herds of wild animals whose raucous barks and bellows fill the air!
The sounds of war are particularly anathema to the biblical writers. Exodus speaks of the "noise of war" (Exodus 32:17). The prophet Jeremiah speaks of "the noise of the stamping of the hoofs of (the enemy's) stallions, ...the clatter of his chariots, (and) ...the rumbling of their wheels...." (Jeremiah 47:3) He speaks of the "noise of battle" (Jeremiah 50:22). To this military din Ezekiel adds "the noise of cavalry, wheels, and chariots" (Ezekiel 26:10). The psalms speak of "the noise of the enemy, ...(and) the clamour of the wicked" (Psalm 55:3), "the clamour of (our) foes, (and) the uproar of (our) adversaries that goes up continually." (Psalm 74:23)
It's not only the dissonance of war that bothers biblical writers. The prophet, Daniel, speaks of "the noise of ...arrogant words" (Daniel 7:11), and the prophet, Amos, says that even the people of God can be noxiously noisy. Amos was disgusted with the hypocritical worship of his own community, and wrote, "Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps." (Amos 5:23) And the New Testament adds its dislike of dissonance, comparing a believer lacking in love to a "noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." (1 Corinthians 13:1) One translation uses the phrase, "blaring brass" (PHL), but that seems unfair to the brass section!
Why Thank we all our God?
The Old Testament people of God also visited faraway places at times, but usually under great duress, when they were forcibly taken away as exiles! On one such occasion a musician in the group, normally adept at composing lyrical tunes, asked, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" (Psalm 137:4, RSV) In other words, how can we sing amidst a cacophony of sounds strange to our ears? How can we sing when we're surrounded by the harsh sounds of our captors? How can we sing upon request when the requests come from our murderous enemies?
Today is the traditional time to sing the classic hymn of thanksgiving, what some call the German Te Deum, "Now Thank we all our God," but how do we sing this song of gratitude in a time of despair? We could ask, for that matter, "Why thank we all our God?" In a whiny culture of complaint and habitual grumbling, why bother with a song of thanksgiving? Assaulted by the monotonous drone of dissension, is it possible to pick out a melody of praise?
I have told the story of Martin Rinckart (1586-1649) before, but it's an incredible story. Rinckart was the son of a poor coppersmith, but he made his way at the University of Leipzig by virtue of hard work and his musical gifts. In 1617 he wrote a cycle of seven comedies to mark the centenary of the Reformation, but when, at the age of thirty-one he became the pastor of a church in Eilenburg, it proved the end of any comedy! He arrived just as the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) broke out, and died there shortly after the war ended. He himself had to endure the quartering of soldiers in his house and the frequent plundering of his modest stock of grain and household goods.
Eilenburg was teeming with fugitives from places of even greater devastation, and half-way through this long war the plague came upon them, claiming 8,000 people in one year, including a great number of school children as well as the other clergymen. Rinckart had to do the work of three, burying more than 4,000 people, sometimes as many as fifty a day! One of the funerals was for his own wife! (1637)
The plague was followed by a severe famine, and it was not uncommon to see thirty or forty people fighting in the streets over a dead cat or crow! Rinckart gave away everything but the barest rations for his own family, but a crowd of starving wretches came to his door daily.
One might think that this onslaught of calamities would have broken Rinckart's spirit, that the harsh sounds of war, the cries of suffering, and the incessant peals of funeral bells would have squelched any melodies of thanksgiving, but in the midst of this great sorrow Martin Rinckart wrote the hymn, "Nun danket alle Gott! Which I invite you to sing — before I continue my sermon.
This week my mind went back to Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's spiritual classic that tells of Christian's perplexing experiences in the various places through which he travelled. How do you sing an upbeat song in the Slough of Despond? How do you sing confidently in the Valley of Humiliation? How do you sing a song of sacrifice on Lucre-hill? How do you sing songs of the Celestial City when surrounded by Bunyan's unattractive characters, Sloth, Mr. Feeble-mind, Mr. Ready-to-halt, and the twins, Despair and Despondency?
It's easy enough, as Charles Spurgeon (1834-92) noted, to sing in good times. It's easy to whistle a happy tune when our cup is full, our coffers overflowing, and our health robust. It's a challenge, however, to pick out a melody of praise in hard times. In one of the inter-testamental books, we read, "Neither the melodies of sirens nor the songs of swans attract the attention of their hearers as (do) the voices of ...children in torture calling to their mother." It's exceedingly difficult to pick out the melody of praise in perplexing and torturous circumstances.
Someone (Richard Gilbert) has written,
Sing a Song of Thanksgiving!
I find, because of my significant hearing impairment, that if two people talk at once, it is very difficult for me to hear either one of them! My inability to isolate intelligible words from a din of simultaneous conversations is severely frustrating, to me as well as to my loved ones, who are asked to repeat everything four times! There are times when I dearly wish some words could be frozen in the air and defrosted only when necessary! Such is fanciful thinking, of course, and we are left to find the melody line of life amidst the other noises clamouring for our attention.
Thank God for those who teach us to listen for the melody line of praise. The thirteenth-century St Mechthild (1240-1298), a gifted singer, wrote these beautiful words:
It's striking that musicians of great note often had a hard life. The Polish composer, Frederic Chopin (1810-49), for example, was delicate to the point of fragility. He was hypersensitive in almost every respect; his ears, eyes, skin, blood and muscles all responded to slight stimuli. His emotions were a mess; he was easily depressed, easily deceived, easily disillusioned, easily exhausted and infected, but out of his wracked body and ragged emotions came joyful music. That he lived into adulthood is a marvel; that he created songs of beauty is miraculous!
Ignace Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), the Polish pianist considered the best Chopin player of his time, and who eventually became the prime minister of Poland after the First World War, often toured North America raising funds for Polish war relief. He was once scheduled to perform at an American concert hall for a high-society extravaganza. In the audience was a mother with a fidgety nine-year-old son who grew tired of waiting for the great pianist to come on stage, so he slipped on stage himself, sat down at the Steinway and began playing "Chopsticks." The roar of the crowd turned to shouts as people yelled, "Get that kid away from there!" When Paderewski heard the noise of the crowd, he rushed on stage, and reaching around the boy from behind, the master pianist began to improvise a counter-melody to "Chopsticks." As the two of them played together, Paderewski kept whispering in the boy's ear, "Keep going. Don't quit, son...don't stop...don't stop."
Our own songs of thanksgiving grow weak at times, the melody of our praise rather elementary, but God is pleased with our attempts, enhances them, and incorporates them into a grander anthem of praise and thanksgiving!
"...the world is full of disharmony -
It's difficult to pick out a melody of praise with the surround-sound of dissonance, or when our own songs are off-key and inharmonious.
Cacophony is everywhere;
The rhythms of living are ragged;
The melody of life often hits sharps and flats
When we least expect them...."
"God plays upon the harp of the Spirit,
Martin Rinckart heard the song, and picked out the melody of praise, even in the midst of unimaginable suffering. The psalmist, in our call to worship (Psalm 8), heard the strain of God's glory and majesty, even in the midst of biblical laments about human frailty and sin. Jesus, in our Gospel reading, healed ten lepers, and at least one of them was moved to sing a song of praise and thanksgiving.
Sounding the strings strongest in love:
And to this mystical music
Humanity is beckoned to sing."
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.