Sermons

August 21, 2005

A HYMN-SING SERMON

By Gordon E. Simmons, Pastor

Reformation Lutheran Church

Christians have had many ways of witnessing to their faith over the centuries. Some give great sermons. Some write books. Some just speak a word of comfort to someone in need. But some Christians have written songs. They put their deepest thoughts and prayers into poetry, and those poems have been put to music. What a wonderful blessing we have been left by so many people who have given their witness in song. We sing the songs every week, and their thoughts and prayers become our thoughts and prayers.

Today we’re going to sing some old songs, some familiar ones, some of our favorite ones. And in my sermon I’d like to teach you some things about them. Some of these songs have great histories.

Some of them have been sung for hundreds of years. The song “Beautiful Savior” was composed by some German Roman Catholic Jesuits, and it first appeared in a hymnbook in 1677. This is a song that emphasizes the beauty and wonder of Christ, and it alludes to his nature, both divine and human – God made flesh – Son of God and Son of Man.

On November 4, 1740, a baby was born in Farnham, England, and he was given the name of Augustus Montague Toplady. His father died in a war, his mother spoiled him, and his friends though he was “sick and neurotic.” But Augustus was interested in the Lord, and at a young age he began preaching sermons and writing hymns, and he eventually became ordained as an Episcopal priest. Toplady lived about the same time when John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, was trying to reform the church of England, and he objected bitterly to some of Wesley’s teachings. He thought that Wesley didn’t rely enough on God’s mercy and forgiveness, so in 1776 – the year of the Declaration of Independence – he wrote a poem about God’s forgiveness. He intended it as a slap against John Wesley. Augustus Toplady died at age 38, but his poem about forgiveness, “Rock of Ages”, has lived for generations. When you feeling guilty, when you need someone to say to you, “I forgive you…and I still love you,” this is the hymn to sing.

John Newton’s mother taught him to memorize Bible passages and she taught him hymns, but she died an early death when John was just seven years old. Young John alternated between boarding schools and the high seas. He joined the British Navy, but then he deserted, after which he was captured, and flogged. Many voyages, dangers, toils, and snares followed. On a day in March of 1748, his ship was caught in a brutal storm, one that came so suddenly that no one expected it. John cried out to the Lord for help, and he was saved from the storm. John Newton was the captain of a slave ship, but his newfound faith caused a reversal in his life and he became a great foe of slavery. He wrote hundreds of hymns, but his most famous one was “Amazing Grace.” When you feel like you’ve been through it all, and yet you know that the Lord has not forgotten you, you can sing this song.

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The first Africans on American shores landed in chains in ships like those John Newton had captained. The terrifying trip across the ocean was only the beginning of their sorrows. Their families were broken up, they were whipped and shackled. But the slaves found release through singing, and a unique form of music developed that was called the “Negro Spiritual.” Former hymns, like those of John Newton, were largely based on Scripture. The African-American slaves, however, composed their songs in the fields and in the barns, and the words dealt with daily pain and future hope. They sang while they worked, and sometimes they hid out in the woods and whispered the songs to themselves. The slaves learned that on their most difficult days, God had not given up on them, and that a better day was coming. And they sang songs like, “There is a Balm in Gilead.”

A man named Joseph Scriven was born in Ireland, but he suffered one tragedy after another in his lifetime. He was engaged to be married to a woman with whom he was deeply in love, but the day before the wedding he watched while they pulled her dead body out of the lake. He packed up all his belongings, left his mother behind and headed for Canada. Ten years later he received word that she was dying, and in his grief, he wrote her a poem. The mother gave a copy to a friend, who had it published anonymously, and it quickly became a popular hymn, although no one knew who had written it. Joseph fell in love again, but before this bride-to-be became the bride, she died of tuberculosis. Joseph Scriven lived a pretty sad life. On his death bed, when a friend came to sit with him, the friend brought a copy of a poem, and started to read it. It was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the poem that Scriven had written for his mother. And that was how the real author was discovered.

Anna and Susan Warner were sisters and they lived in a lovely townhouse in New York City with their father, who was a successful lawyer. There was a great recession, however, it was called the Panic of 1837, and it wrecked the family’s finances, forcing them to move into a ramshackle old house out in the country opposite West Point. Anna and Susan knew they had to do their part to add to the family income, so they started writing poems and stories for publication. Anna wrote “Robinson Crusoe’s Farmyard,” and Susan wrote “The Wide, Wide World.” In all, they published 106 different poems, stories, and books. One they wrote together was entitled “Say and Seal”, in which a little boy, Johnny Fox, is dying. His Sunday School teacher comforts him by taking him in his arms, rocking him, and making up a little song, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…” The novel became a best-seller, second only to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in its day, and the little song became the best known children’s hymn on earth. For forty years, Susan and Anna conducted Bible classes for cadets at West Point, and they are still the only civilians buried in the military cemetery at West Point. This is a song we all learned when we were children:

When the great Chicago fire consumed the Windy City in 1871, Horatio G. Spafford, an attorney heavily invested in real estate, lost a fortune. About this time, his only son, aged 4, died as a result of scarlet fever. Horatio drowned his grief in his work, pouring himself into rebuilding the city and assisting the 100,000 left homeless by the fire. In 1873 Spafford decided to take his wife and 4 daughters to Europe for a vacation. When an urgent matter came up for him in New York, he sent his wife, Anna and the daughters ahead. He saw them settled in a cabin aboard a luxurious French ocean-liner. He sent them off, promising to follow them soon. Out in the ocean, the ship collided into an iron sailing vessel, and water poured into its holds. There were 226 fatalities, including Horatio’s four daughters. The wife was found nearly unconscious, clinging to a piece of wreckage. When Spafford received the news, he booked passage immediately to join his wife. En route, on a cold December night, the captain pointed out, “this is the spot where the ocean-liner went down.” Spafford went to his cabin but found it hard to sleep. He said to himself, “It is well; the will of God be done.” Later he wrote a poem, that has become a hymn that we have sung over the years: “It Is Well With My Soul”.

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In 1885, Carl Boberg, a 26-year-old Swedish minister, wrote a poem which he called “O Mighty God.” His poem was published, but soon forgotten. Several years later, Boberg was surprised to hear the poem being sung to an old Swedish melody, but it didn’t become very well-known. Later, an English missionary working in Russia expanded the words and the verses,

inspired, he said, by Russia’s rugged Carpathian Mountains. Some time later, an American evangelist heard the hymn being sung in India, and he brought it back to America. During the Billy Graham Crusade in 1954 in London, George Beverly Shea was given a leaflet containing the hymn. He sang it to himself and shared it with other members of the Graham team. It wasn’t used then in London, but it was introduced the following year to audiences in Toronto. At the New York Crusade in 1957, Shea sang it 99 times, always with the grand choir singing the chorus: Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee, How great Thou art! How great Thou art!

“Precious Lord” was written by Thomas Dorsey, but it wasn’t the famous bandleader, it was Thomas Andrew Dorsey, who was the son of a Black revivalist preacher. Thomas was born in a small town in Georgia in 1899. When he was young, he moved to Atlanta, where he began to love the blues, and began playing piano at a vaudeville theater. Later he moved to Chicago, and started playing at one of Al Capone’s Chicago speakeasies and leading jazz bands. Dorsey was converted to Christianity in 1921 at the Nation Baptist Convention in Chicago, and he began writing gospel songs and trying to get them published. It was discouraging at first. He said, “I borrowed $5 and sent out 500 copies of my song (entitled “If You See My Savior”) to churches all over the country. It was three years before I got a single order. I felt like going back to the blues.” In August of 1932, while leading music in St. Louis, he was handed a telegram bearing the words, “Your wife just died.” A friend drove him through the night to get home, and then he learned that his baby boy had died too. “I began to feel that God had done me an injustice,” Dorsey later said. “I didn’t want to serve Him any more or write anymore gospel songs.” But the next Saturday, while alone in a friend’s music room, he had a “strange feeling” inside —a sudden calm and quiet stillness. “As my fingers began to manipulate over the keys, words began to fall in place. “Precious Lord, Take my hand”, and the song just flowed out. Today Thomas A. Dorsey is remembered as the “Father of Gospel Music” and the author of hundreds of gospel songs.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise to know that so many of the hymns we sing on Sunday mornings grew out of the passion, the problems, the sorrows, and the moments of faith of people who then put down in writing what was on their mind. When people cried, they sang. When they worried, they sang. When they were in trouble, they sang. We do to, and those who have gone before have left us some wonderful words to sing. Thanks be to God!

The information in this sermon is taken from Then Sings My Soul by Robert J. Morgan.

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