SINGING YOUR LIFE AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
Text: Colossians 3:12-17

Singing your life as spiritual practice. “Spiritual practice” is a new way of speaking of something both ancient and new. Spiritual practices are forms of lived, embodied faith woven into the rhythm of your life. They include things like prayer, worship, peacemaking, hospitality, household stewardship and care of your body.

To be spiritual practices they must be an intentional part of your life. They may be practiced alone, but they are best practiced in the context of a spiritual community which undergirds and encourages them. Congregations which work consciously to undergird and encourage them are called “practicing congregations.” May we be in their number.

One form of spiritual practice is, as Don Saliers of Emory has named it, “singing your life.”
Jonathan, on this day of your installation as our minister of music, we say: Help us sing our lives to God, help us sing our whole lives to God.

I

Worship is the bringing of our whole selves nakedly and honestly into the presence of God. John Calvin called the psalms “the anatomy of all parts of the soul.” Psalms help us bring our praise and exultation, our awe and wonder, our fears and searching doubts, our joy and thanksgiving, our rage and pain, our sadness and our aching hope.

Praise, my soul, the King of heaven
All creatures of our God and King
Out of the depths I cry to Thee
I need Thee every hour
Now thank we all our God
Come, ye disconsolate
Amazing grace
We shall overcome someday....

Do you remember the first song you ever heard? The first song you ever sang? Do you remember your first song about God? Your first church-song?

Songs strengthen us in difficult times. How many remember, during World War II, hearing Kate Smith singing “God Bless America”? Songs embody our joy and help us feel it again when it has been lost.

Too often the church sings a small sliver of the soul and a narrow band of musical language, letting us bring only part of who we are to church. A middle-of-the-road, middle-of-the-soul kind of music. Nothing too happy, too sad, too emotional, too dissonant, too challenging, too anything.
Jonathan, help us sing our whole lives to God!

II

Second point: we not only sing our lives to God. We sing the world to God. We open our eyes, our hearts, our voices and we sing others to God: Our friends, our enemies, the hungry and the lost, those who cry for justice, and those the world forgets.

We sing people to heaven, and we sing people to healing. We sing people to hope, and we sing people out of bondage into freedom. We sing people of every race and continent and every zip code of Charlotte. We sing the world to God.

III

Finally (have you ever heard “finally” this soon?), we sing together as the church, and we sing the new song given us in Christ.

We sing the gospel handed down to us which we now hand along to our children. It is both words and music.

St. Augustine said, “Whoever sings prays twice.” That is, once with the words, then with sounds too deep for words. John Wesley called hymns “a body of practical divinity.” We sing our theology, and we sing a spirituality deeper than theology.

And we sing together. No matter how you sing, you become part of the church’s song. You may just stand there and vibrate with everyone else’s singing. You may sing in your own personal key, the priesthood of all singers. But you become part of the church’s song.

A recent TV story bemoaned the loss of communal singing in our nation. It began with a paraphrase of Tennyson: “Music, music everywhere but not a note to sing.”

We are the i-Pod generation, music pouring into our ears as we walk along the street - - all in our own little sonic world.

Churches are one of the few places left where people sing together.

Jonathan and I ask your help at this point. There are songs you need to sing; and there are songs we need to sing together. What hymns do you most need, most want to sing? We cannot know this without “holy conversation” with you, where you tell us the songs that are most important to your life. To love you is to love your music. To receive you is to receive your music.

We have a holy calling as ministers to help you sing the songs you most need to sing, songs worthy of the gospel and worthy of our best heart and mind and soul. Come, teach us as we teach you.

A little later six representatives of the church will lay hands on Jonathan, as ancient symbol of the Holy Spirit empowering our ministry. At that moment we will pray God’s blessings upon his ministry with us. And we will be saying to him:

Help us sing our whole lives to God.
Help us sing the world to God.
Help us sing our new song in Christ, and sing it together!