Lent 8

I'm a huge Methodist nerd. I'm also a huge music nerd. The natural intersection of those two subject matters is Charles Wesley, the brother of John Wesley. 

For those who don't know, Charles Wesley penned the words to somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 hymns during his life, about 500 of which are still widely sung in churches today. I have a professor in Seminary who is fond of saying that hymns are portable theology. That is to say that hymns take large and complex theological ideas and condense them into something that is easy to grasp and take to heart for the layperson. This is especially true of Charles Wesley's texts, which rely heavily first on scripture, but also the theological ideas of his brother, John. In fact, my professor argues (and I'm inclined to agree) that Methodism would not have taken off if it weren't for Charles' hymn texts. 

As I mentioned, Wesley wrote a number of hymns that we still know and love today. “And Can It Be That I Should Gain?”  “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today”. “Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown”. “Love Divine, All Love's Excelling”. And yet, when people talk about THE Wesley hymn, chances are that they are talking about "O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing”. This is such an important hymn in the life of the Methodist Church, that the first three entries in our Hymnal are versions of this hymn (the hymn in English, the full hymn text, and the hymn translated into Spanish). 

This hymn comes from a larger poem written by Charles Wesley. The full poem is seventeen verses long. Most people will go their whole lives without reading or singing the full poem, but then again, most people don't take classes with Eileen Guenther. Today, in our class on hymnody, we sang all seventeen verses. Eileen had prefaced the singing of it by saying that some of her previous students had described singing all sixteen verses as a mountaintop experience. I'm not going to go that far, but I will say that there's just something about singing “harlots and publicans and thieves” that's...well just special. Special enough to be my God sighting for the day. I'm going to attach the full poem below, and I really encourage you to read it (maybe even sing it). I hope it proves to be as great a joy for you as it did for me. 

Today, I saw God in a really long hymn.