the faith of human beings and this is the only way into a coherent, adventurous, meaningful life in the world. Faith that begins merely as a blind quest for spiritual reality, can in its way be a noble thing, but it can be a grievously misleading thing. The early explorers sailed west across the Atlantic in hopes that they might find the Indies and Cathay, a splendid story of adventure, but just look where they landed, Watergate! In our days people have sailed out across the oceans of drugs and psychological experiment, some seeking no more than the trip, others genuinely looking for spiritual reality.
It is well to start with the faithfulness of God. Christian faith does not generate its own blast-off, the initiative is with God. The same is true with hope. God is our hope and he will always be our hope for we shall never possess Him. Because he is hope, hope is not a mockery. I have a future, the world has a future. These are not easy propositions to believe. For myself, I have made a mess of most of the really important things I tried to do; and in the world I do not feel entirely alone in this. If I leave God out of account, hope for the world in its various social, political, economic, moral chances, demands more optimism than I can command. But if I start with God, if I see hope as a theological virtue, then it acquires substance and reality. I do not gain hope from Robin Day’s swingometer, whichever way it goes, right or left. God is hope.
Last and greatest God is love. That doesn’t mean as Tolstoy says somewhere, “I went and sowed corn in my enemy’s field, that God might exist.” Quite the reverse; love is a theological virtue, and God’s is prior to my love. We love because he first loved us. And only in this love, in which we give ourselves to one another, as he gives himself to us all, can we know God.
One thing more. You may think that I have been making too heavy a theological meal of a very simple affair. Perhaps I have—though I shall not apologize. Paul is profound and it may do no harm once in a while to peer into the deep water. But the greatest profundity and the most perfect simplicity comes when you see that Paul in this chapter is speaking about Jesus Christ. I do not mean merely that he is the model who sat for the portrait of love, though that is true. I mean that he is faith, hope, and love, that he is the place where these come true in God and in humankind.
If there is a spiritual reality for the common unmystical person, he is it, his faithfulness and his faith alike are mine. If there is hope for me, hope for the world, he is that hope—the realization and reaffirmation of the promise. And he is the love of God, the love of God for me, the love of God within me.
“Every attempt to understand love as a virtue and a work inverts the Gospel of 1 Corinthians 13 into a law” (G. Bornkamm). That means that here is no interesting sort of religious phenomena, no religious or moral code demanding obedience, here Jesus Christ offers himself—faith, hope, and love, to us all.
•
“WITH THE SPIRIT AND THE MIND”—1 Corinthians 14.15
[Preached five times from 5/14/89 at Elm Ridge to 6/6/99 at Harrowgate Hill]
The choir’s weekend, and Whitsunday, Pentecost, the Spirit’s weekend too. What can we do about that? In my time I have read a good many books about Paul, but I have never found one on Paul and Music, Paul the Musicologist. And yet, when you look for it, there is quite a quantity of material to work on, especially just about this point in 1 Corinthians. It occurred to me that you could fill in a page of a full score for a full orchestra. You begin, as you know, at the top of the page with the woodwind, blowing instruments made of wood. Paul knows them; here in this chapter “if even lifeless instruments such as the flute do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played?” In fact, what the Greeks had was not so much like a flute as an oboe or a clarinet; it had a reed and two tubes, and if you had puff enough and were clever enough you could play two notes at once. One perhaps, may have worked like the drone on a bagpipe.
After the woodwind comes the brass, blowing instruments made of metal. Paul knows all about them. Turn back a chapter and you find the famous words, “if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I become sounding brass”—a term the BBC has borrowed for a series of programs by brass bands. Back in chapter 14, if the trumpet gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? And in chapter 15 there is the trumpet about which there will be no indistinctness. “We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet; for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.” And of course you will think of the Messiah or the unforgettable Brahm’s Requiem, at this weekend some years ago. There is so much brass in Paul that the Salvation Army might taken him as their patron saint; and he would probably be more at home with them than with most of us.
After the brass, the percussion and we go back to chapter 13. “I may have all the tongues there are, but if I have no love, I am become sounding brass and clanging cymbal.” And at the bottom of the page, the strings. Here one must admit, Paul is above them for the Greeks had no bowed instruments. But they did have strings and they knew that the frequency of a string depended on its length, tension, and density. For they had harps and lyres, and Paul knew it. If the harp does not give distinct knows, who will know what is played? And in the midst of the same passage comes the vocal line; and that is where we get down to serious business. They sang in Church in those days, just as for centuries the Jews had been singing out of their hymnbook, the Psalms. And Paul knows how to do it—I will sing with the Spirit and I will sing with my mind too. Here is our first proper theme: and like the Greek oboe, it has two pipes.
INSPIRATION AND INTELLECTUAL DISCIPLINE
I have finished, nearly finished, with music for the present. The briefest allusion will do. You know that to write music, to perform it, you must have both. There must be the tunefulness that simply bubbles up, and there must be the sternest discipline that struggles to control the stubborn figures and vocal chords to get it on paper and out of the instrument. Even if you want to be a modern, like Honegger or Messiaen, or in his day Beethoven, and break the rules, you have to first learn how to keep them. Inspiration and iron discipline, there is no music without both.
But was Paul? He was writing to a chaotic Church. I do not know if they had choir, but I am certain that if they did, one member said, “I am going to sing in the key of A, and the next said I am going to sing in B, and the next I’m going to sing in E sharp minor.” This is—was—serious. They were like that. And many of them were prepared to blame it on the Holy Spirit. “We must speak or sing as the Spirit moves us, and the Spirit will never be more plainly at work than if we do outrageous things and speak in unreal languages that no one can understand.” There are people still who, without going to Corinthian excess, will do the same sort of thing. What on this day of the Holy Spirit, has Paul to say about it?
“I will pray and I will sing with the Spirit, and I will pray and I will sing with my mind too.” Both; inspiration and discipline. Paul had no wish to damp down enthusiasm. He wanted the Church’s worship to be an occasion when the Spirit’s work could be seen and heard. He would not have thought much of a service that was simply read out of a book. Inspiration yes; but inspiration schooled by discipline to make it rational and intelligible. How else will anyone else understand you? God no doubt understands when you babble, but no one else does; no one can say Amen to a prayer that means nothing to him. No one will be converted by words he does not understand. Both are needed in music; whether it is secular or liturgical. Both are needed in the Christian assembly.
But there is more to say than that. Many of us are visible corporate Christians for one hour out of every 168. Even if you push it up to three hours with Sunday evening and once during the week, it is only 1.78 percent of your time, and being a Christian requires 100 percent. There is a lot more to being a Christian than what we do here. And this is Paul’s emphasis. You may do all the obvious and important religious things, speak with known and angelic eloquence; understand all mysteries of theology; work miracles and be a martyr. But all these wonderful spiritual activities
