Daily Lesson for August 15, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson is a follow-up to yesterday's lesson on the power of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs:

Martin Luther said, "He who sings prays twice."

Psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs are two-tiered. There is the lyrics and then the melody, there is head and then there is the heart, there is the present song being sung and then there is the memory of the song sung hundreds or thousands of times before. There is this moment here and now whenever and wherever we might be, and then there is the eternity we are drawn into where space and time collapse into one and in that moment of singing we join voices with the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before and will come after us.  

We know it in our hearts when in certain moments we have joined that heavenly chorus and the two-tiers of heaven and earth have become one in song.

That happened to me not long ago with a woman, Gaylon Cobb, who I will help bury today. Gaylon suffered from an Alzheimer's-like dementia. In the four years I have been her pastor there was no we could communicate with one another in words. So often when I would go to visit I would try to communicate on another level - through song.  I can't sing well, but I do sing with joy and I sing with a smile. And I would go into Gaylon's room and sit on the edge of her bed and hold her hand and sing.

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound . . ."

And though she no longer had the words, so often a twinkle of light could be seen in her eyes and she would hum along the tune.

Emily Dickinson said, "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all."

In spite of her illness, there was a hope in Gaylon Cobb.  And though she did not have the words, she had the tune. In other words, her song was always a pitch higher. It was a prayer twice sung from memory to hope* and on earth as it is in heaven.


*"From memory to hope" is from a title of one of Thomas G Long's books "Preaching from Memory to Hope"