Isaiah 12:2-6
“Drinking Song”
December 16, 2018 – Third Sunday in Advent
[We apologize for the low audio level on the recording for this sermon as well as for the difficulty in hearing the responsive reading at any level at the beginning.]
Today on the third Sunday of Advent we lit a pink candle instead of purple. Why? Because the rosy color symbolizes joy. Advent in the church calendar is a season to repent in preparation for Christ’s return. John the Baptist called for repentance in our Gospel lesson from Luke 3. His somber message is why the main Advent color is purple. Here at Valley Covenant we try to hold off singing Christmas carols on Sunday morning for at least the first couple of Sundays in Advent. But on this third Sunday we take a break, suspend gloomy songs like “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and focus on the joy Jesus brings us.
The word for being joyful, for rejoicing in Latin is gaudete. Last Sunday we heard our Valley Covenant Singers beautifully sing “Gaudete” for us. Some churches call today, with its pink candle, “Gaudete Sunday.” This morning, our readings from Paul’s letters and from the Old Testament, a prophecy from Zephaniah and the canticle we just read from Isaiah, call us to do just that, to rejoice and to sing, to “shout aloud and sing for joy.”
Last week as my wife Beth reported what our singers sang to our daughter over Skype, she got a little mixed up and said they sang “Gaudeamus Igitur.” Our daughter Susan the classicist laughed. That song, also ancient, is about rejoicing, but the words are not about salvation coming but about the fact that life is short. College students around the world have sung it as an excuse to do some drinking.
Drinking songs can be joyful. You could see Isaiah’s song today in that way, although it’s water, not wine, that is being imbibed. In the third verse of Isaiah pictures his people joyfully drawing water from “the wells of salvation.” So, together with its call to rejoicing, you might call it a “drinking song.”
It’s common “knowledge” that Martin Luther and the Wesley brothers set many of their hymns to popular drinking songs. Except it’s not true. What everyone supposedly “knows” is a myth. The early Christian rocker Larry Norman is partly responsible because he falsely quoted Luther as saying “Why should the devil have all the good music?” and wrote a song with that question as the title. But Luther didn’t say it and none of his hymns used a drinking song for a tune.
One source of the Luther/Wesley myth about drinking songs is that there is a musical structure from the middle ages known as “bar form” or even “bar tune.” It refers to bars of music, not the kind you sit at and order scotch and soda. It’s a simple form which repeats a short melody twice, adds a new line of melody once, then returns to the original melody. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” as well as many other hymns are written in “bar form,” AABA, to get technical. Ask our doctor of music Lynn if you want to know more. It doesn’t mean they were drinking songs.
That Christian myth about borrowing drinking songs has a generally laudable purpose. Christian musicians and worshippers don’t want the music they sing in church to be dull, lifeless and less joyful or exciting than tunes you hear in movies or download on-line. Why should praise of God be boring and less fun to hear and sing than a song from Kanye West or Mariah Carey?
It might be fine to borrow popular tunes or styles for Christian music. But let’s not forget the purpose of our music as Christians. Songs the world might broadcast to our cars or pipe into our ears through little wires are often about us, about how we feel at the moment, about what makes us feel good, or simply what we like. Isaiah’s “drinking song,” if we call it that, was focused first and foremost on God, not on somebody’s taste in music. We don’t even know what tune he might have intended. He sang not because the music felt good, the words were catchy, the harmony was tight, or the beat was cool. Isaiah sang because of what God had done and what He would do.
If you back up to verse 1, Isaiah does focus some on feelings
‘I will give thanks to you, O Lord.
for though you were angry with me,
your anger turned away
and you comforted me.’”
Yet those feelings are as much God’s as the prophet’s. Isaiah is turned in that direction, toward thanking and praising God for forgiveness and for comfort.
So verse 2 goes on:
Surely God is my salvation,
I will trust, and will not be afraid
The Lord God is my strength and my might;
he has become my salvation
“The Lord God is my strength and my might…” Again, Isaiah’s poetry is aimed at the Lord, not what kind of music he likes. It’s a song that invites us to join in because God is strong and good and comes to our help. That’s what we remember as we sing about Jesus coming today on the Joy Sunday of Advent.
That’s the real difference between the world’s drinking songs and the songs of God. I used to listen to maudlin country western songs like Willie Nelson’s “Whiskey River take my mind,” or Charlie Daniels’ “I’m drinkin’ my baby away.” Those are all about being alone, feeling sorry for yourself. “Gaudeamus Igitur” is about forgetting death. They are focused on us, on forgetting the woman who did me wrong or putting aside the shortness of life. But God’s songs are about Him, about what He has done, about being part of His kingdom and sharing that kingdom with the world. In verses 4 and 5 Isaiah sings,
Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name
make known his deeds among the nations;
proclaim that his name is exalted.
Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously
let this be known in all the earth.
In our Gospel text this morning from Luke 3, John the Baptist saw crowds coming to the water, water for baptism rather than drinking. But John wondered if they were truly coming for the water, coming to meet the Lord in the water of repentance, or simply to be entertained by the latest crackpot in the desert. He asked them, “Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”
John understood that some of the crowd came to be baptized for purely selfish reasons. They were there to buy themselves a ticket on the train to heaven, to escape the sinking ship, to get out from under God’s axe before it falls, as John told them was about to happen. If they came to sing the Lord’s songs, it wasn’t really to drink in God’s kingdom, it was to forget their troubles.
Some of those who came out to see John at the river really were there for the water. They wanted to be dunked deep and come out as new people. So they asked how to go about it. Ordinary people and tax collectors and soldiers all asked, “What should we do?” You and I might ask the same question. What should we do to make ourselves spiritually better? How can we escape God’s wrath and get on His good side? What kind of spiritual exercise program should we undertake? What Bible passages should we read? What prayers should we pray? What songs should we sing?
I once read a silly fantasy book about King Arthur in the modern world.[1] The once and future king came back to life and had in his possession the Holy Grail, the mythical cup from which Jesus supposedly drank at the Last Supper. In the story, drinking water from the Grail healed a person of any illness, from cancer to arthritis to heart disease. It even healed deadly wounds.
Arthur was tormented by the fact that he has the means to do so much good, but that it would be impossible for everyone to drink from his Grail. So when an enthusiastic entrepreneur showed up, Arthur agreed to a huge beverage bottling operation. Water was piped through the holy cup, then bottled. It was sold as “Grail Ale.” Buy a bottle or two, take it home, then drink it down to experience complete healing. It was a miracle in a bottle, individually packaged for anyone who wants it.
“Grail Ale” is a silly fantasy, but it reflects the kind of spiritual answers we often look for. Give us a holy prescription for whatever is wrong in our lives. We will swallow it and then live happily ever after. Yet John’s reply to the crowd was definitely not in terms of some private spiritual exercise. He did not hand out a magic beverage or powerful prescription for salvation and tell each person to walk away and drink it alone.
Instead, each time John answered the question “What shall we do?” in terms of how you and I relate to each other. He told the crowds to share what they had with people who had little. He told tax collectors to be honest and treat the public fairly. He told soldiers not to practice false arrest and extortion, but to be content with their own pay. John was there to prepare a community of people ready to listen to Jesus.
God’s drinking songs are corporate celebrations, not drown-your-sorrows ballads of personal heartache. They are calls to join in a great company of people who have met God in His Son Jesus and sing for the joy of that blessing. As Zephaniah says, “I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you.” You don’t go off alone with your troubles, but you bring your troubles to others and they in turn bring theirs to you. As Paul says in Galatians 6:2, we carry each other’s burdens, and rejoice in the fact that God will finally lift all our burdens from us.
We do our rejoicing together. That is crucial. It’s crucial because the biblical call to rejoice in the Lord is a command. Our reading from Philippians also expresses that Gaudete theme, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again. Rejoice!” Take that command to apply to you individually and alone and it may seem like a cruel joke. As Christmas draws near, you may be depressed. There may be trouble at home. You may be missing someone you love. You may be worried about what next year holds. To tell you individually to just shape up and rejoice would be wrong.
No, the call and command to rejoice in the Lord comes to all of us together. God gathers His people together so we can carry each other into the joy of His salvation. I learned this from Christian writer Marva Dawn. When one of us is unable to rejoice, others of us will pick up the song. If I cannot obey the command to rejoice today, there are other believers who will rejoice for me.
Verse 6 of Isaiah’s drinking song says, “Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion…” Literally it says, “Shout aloud and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion.” It was Isaiah’s reminder to each person in his day that he or she was not alone. They were part of something, the city of Zion, the great capital of Israel where people together worshipped God. God does not mean for us to be individual persons of joy, each of us a sunny little Pollyanna whistling happy tunes as we skip down the path of life. He means for us to be a people of joy, a great community of rejoicing because we share in His salvation. Not each of you, but all of you together, rejoice in the Lord always, carrying along with you those who are troubled or tired or just timid.
Again, though, the rejoicing is not about us. We’re not here to just sing happy songs until we all feel better. We are here because we know that God is here with us. This whole season is about the fact that God has come to be present with us in His Son Jesus.
Isaiah’s song concludes with the true source and reason for our joy: “for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” It’s the same thing Zephaniah told us today,
The Lord, your God, is in your midst…
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing…
God came to us in Jesus and He is leading the singing. We don’t need to work hard to create a joyful mood or make each other feel good. We sing because our Lord is here. The Holy One of Israel is in our midst. We sing because of the fulfillment of the prophecy Isaiah gave just a few pages back in chapter 7. A baby has been born in Bethlehem and one of His names is “Immanuel,” God with us. In Jesus Christ, God has come down to us and lives with us. So we rejoice.
Jesus came into our world and was born in the corner of a small village that was so full his bed had to be in a trough for feeding cattle. He walked long and hard down lonely roads and had to ask a despised foreigner for a drink when was thirsty. The cup He drank as He died on a cross was filled with vinegar. But He rose from the dead and filled our cups to overflowing. He gave us a cup of salvation to drink in remembrance of Him. He gave us wells of salvation so that whoever drinks that living water will never thirst.
The best drinking songs are sung joyfully in good company. That’s why God brought you here today, to sing together in a community of joy. You may not be ready to rejoice this morning. Yet God is in our midst. Great is the Holy One who is with us. Christ our Savior is born and He is here. So we can rejoice. Together we can sing as we cannot sing alone. We can shout aloud and sing for joy, because Jesus lives and is with us now. May you find your place in that song and in that joy this morning.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Peter David, Knight Life (New York: Ace Books, 2006).