Sing a New Song

I never walk into St. James on Christmas Eve without remembering the first Christmas Eve I spent here in 1999.  It was an exciting night. The church was fuller than I’d ever seen a church in my life. There were people everywhere, in the foyer, in folding chairs on the sides and up front and in the aisle.  Standing at the door, all I could see was a little sliver of space to squeeze through in the procession to the altar.  The energy of hope and expectation was palpable.  The choir had prepared new service music to debut that night, and Mary Jo, Carroll, and Charles were on pins and needles with anticipation.  I was too.  There was the beautiful carol singing to begin with, and then, the moment came, and we assembled in the foyer.  Read Larsen was the chalice bearer, and as we waited for the Processional to begin he said to me, “Boy it’s crowded, I hope no one catches on fire.”

Those words were to prove prophetic.

Up front now, looking out at a sea of faces.  I saw Tommy Thomas, who had cancer and was in his last months of life (he died on Holy Tuesday, 2000).  Tommy had invited me to visit him weekly and he called these visits our “Tuesdays with Morrie” time because while I went as a pastor, he and I both knew that I was really a student of wisdom and wisdom was what he had to impart.  So I already knew Tommy a bit, and I knew about one of his little idiosyncrasies.  I knew that he liked all sorts of music. He was crazy about Jazz, and he was a fan of bluegrass and hillbilly music, he also liked classical music. He already was planning his funeral with Herman Cooke and I, and the reason he was having the funeral at HI Community Church was, well there were two reasons. The up front reason was because St. James could not possibly hold all the people who would attend. The other, hard to explain reason, was because he wanted all sorts of music.  He wanted Catherine Reed to sing some gospel songs and he wanted the whole congregation to sing “When the Saints Come Marching In” and dance in a conga line while we sang it.  However, his formation at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City (which he called Mad Mary’s) had fixed the idea in him that such forms of music should never be permitted in the Episcopal Church.

I was watching the faces in the congregation, and the choir was getting ready to debut a new Gloria.  Jared Warner began to beat out a rhythm on the tambourine.  And I saw Tommy.  Oh boy. His face turned red, then purple.  He turned round and shot an angry glance back at the choir.  He was furious.  Uh oh.

The Gloria was beautiful, by the way, and very festive.  The choir outdid itself. The whole service was full of joy, of love, of wonder – it was uplifted by our worship of God. It was an incredible time. And then we came to the climax of the evening. Jason Tennant got out his guitar and began to strum the opening chords of Silent Night. I quickly ducked out to dim the lights. Read, who was standing near the Advent candles, moved a couple of inches towards them and I heard a scream, saw the flare of flames, and faster than a speeding bullet Phil Bressler jumped the front pew with a long wool coat in his arms and hugged it round Read to put out the fire.

Read’s words had proved prophetic.  Someone did catch on fire. It was Read.

He was not hurt, not in the least.  And he moved from that moment to the next without batting an eye.  He walked up to Tommy on the stairs back here, with all the people coming and going and said, “You and I are lucky to be alive tonight. We are lucky to be here celebrating Christmas with all these people we love.  And I can’t see why you would be upset about tambourines in church when we have so little time left to live.”  Tommy, true to the wisdom that was so hard won in his life, acknowledged the truth of that statement and dropped the whole thing.  It was Christmas and we were in church – time to think about God and the incredible sacrifices that Christ made on our behalf.  Time to sing to the Lord a new song – a song of joyful praise, a song of the surrendered ego, a song of the liberated spirit, a song of the heart purified of resentment, anger, grudges, etc., a new song.  Time to let the old song go, let it fade away.  A new song has taken its place, and that new song needs us to sing it out.  A new song, for a new creation.  Behold I am doing a new thing – the former things, the wars, and rivalries and competitions and intrigues and offended egos have all faded away.  This is a new thing – this is a new song, and song of the spirit, a song of new life, a song that frees us from the bondage of all that old stuff that comes in the package of original sin.

Read continued on downstairs and dressed as Santa Claus.  He had a group of children gathered round and he was in his red suit with his long white beard.  “Ho, ho, ho,” he sang out.  One of the more savvy children piped up. “You’re not Santa. You’re that guy who caught on fire.”

“Oh my child, Santa can do many things,” he said.

Well I don’t know if Santa can do many things, but I do know that God can.  God can utterly change and transform our lives – if we will. That’s the key.  If we will.  We do have wills that rebel against God.  That is what we have to realize.  God can’t change us if we will not.  Our wills are vital to the process.  The truth is sometimes we think we will, but most of the time we will not.  And we don’t acquaint ourselves with the parts of us that will not, so we can’t even fight the good fight to resist our own rebellion against God.  That’s all heady theological language.  Let me give you an example.

Actually, I just did.  Tommy Thomas did a lot of inner work.  He was a spiritually mature man.  And he could recognize the parts of his personality that resisted God.  One of them rose up in the old prejudice against tambourines in the Episcopal Church.  That uprising of anger about it threatened to keep him from giving his attention to God on Christmas Eve.  And anger is like that for all of us.  It blocks out God most effectively.  It sure does for me.  That’s why its good to see it quickly, do whatever needs to be done and drop it immediately.

But that takes a lot of humble self-awareness, a lot of work.  Tommy had done that, and he could drop it, and when a true friend invited him to drop it, he did.

That is what church is.  It is a community where I am invited and challenged to drop the old song and take up the new.  It is a place where I can recognize that I keep on singing the old song when God wants me to sing the new.  It is a place where I am called to practice dropping the old ways of thinking, sounding, and acting, and instead, take up the cross of Baptism and begin to sing a new song.  When I met Tommy and Read and so many others, many of whom have passed on, many of whom are still here with us, I saw that the church really can be what it is called to be, a place of transformation.  And this church is indeed just that, a place for people who are trying to lay aside the old song in favor of the new.

Let’s sing a new song tonight.  Sing it to the Lord.  This song is not for sale. It is not a performance.  What other people think of it does not matter in the least.  We can sing it even though the organ is not yet built, and even though we are tired, or grieving the loss of those we love who have died.  We can sing it even though we have had fits of anger today, episodes of being lost in anxiety or resentment.  We can drop all that, and sing the new song.  Here and now. We can do this because this is a love song to our God, a song of adoration of the Christ who was willing to be born among us, to endure our envy, anger, resentment, general bad moods, and cruelty, to endure them even to the point of being crucified, for the sake of waking us up to the bad state of affairs in this world, and invite us to a new way of life.  And when we recognize the presence of our Beloved, what is the heart’s response but to sing its love song right out loud. And the beloved receives it in the truth of the love with which it is offered.  We do not have to have a voice like Pavarotti to sing to God.  A little child singing off-key will lead us.  We are here to worship God and God’s love creates the new song.

The new song heralds the new life.  It is a humble song of adoration of the One who is so much greater than any one of us in this crazy, violent world.  The new song is more beautiful than the most beautiful song we can think of.  And we approach it in our carols tonight.  Contrast the beauty of this music with the noise of this world – the noise of the radio, the television, the constant chatter – “the Babel sounds,” as one carol puts it.  The new song is sung tonight, and, on behalf of the church throughout history, I invite you to keep singing the new song as you move out into the world. Drop the old song. No more anger, bitterness, resentment, envy, intrigue or the rest. Drop it.  Join the angel chorus. Let us sing a new song.


The Rev. Edie Bird

Feast of the Nativity, 2007
24  December 2007

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