* * * 1 Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Pantheon, 1999).

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1 Be Thou My Vision Rev. Preacher John 1:1-5 & Daniel 4:37 The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany February 9, 2014 Scripture Introduction Each Sunday of this series, we are focusing on what one of the great and often-sung hymns says about God and what it might say about us. Today our hymn is the beautiful and stirring Be Thou My Vision. Our theological focus is on the Incarnation, and the focus on us returns to our founding pastor, Rev. Courtney Smith. Today we have two Scripture readings to lead us in these reflections. The first is a single verse from the Book of Daniel from which the phrase High King of Heaven, a phrase used in Be Thou My Vision, derives. The second reading is from the prologue to John s Gospel, one of the classic texts used by the Christian tradition to explore the meaning of the Incarnation. * * * I m learning over the weeks of this series that you really do love these hymns. Yet on the walk to church this morning I realized that today I m also telling you why I love this particular hymn I asked to have it sung at my ordination and at my installation here. I think that my love for it is not far from your own. It reminds me of Anne Lamott s description of the singing in her church: Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food. 1 I m certain that you really do love these hymns. And I m glad. When we sing them, they have a deep effect. They form us and feed us. We retain song lyrics far longer than other words. They form and sustain us in the deep places. Ever since our One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary celebration in 2011, I have been reflecting on Westminster s first pastor, Rev. Courtney Smith. Smith was a known abolitionist. He was also an intellectual, a New School Presbyterian versed in the biblical criticism that was coming out of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. And he was a revivalist. Now, I suspect that the first two appellations abolitionist and intellectual are more palatable and easier for us to relate to than that last: revivalist. Revivalist sounds like televangelist and indeed Oral Roberts and Billy Graham, among other televangelists, got their starts at camp revivals. The story is that Courtney Smith was interested in coming to Westminster, in part, because our first building was located right near the Army barracks where revival meetings were held. He wanted to preach revivals. These revivals, or camp meetings, were away from their usual indoor places, where people would gather to listen to preachers preach and pray, and where they d sing hymns (a big part of it). The setting and the fervor of the preachers and of the gathering, and the moving music, all together had an emotional effect. There were two primary goals of the camp meeting. One was to revive the faith of believers; the goal was to confirm and strengthen their faith. Another goal was to make new believers through conversion. And I would suspect that even what has come to be known as an altar call was often part of the revivals Courtney Smith preached. We don t have a great deal of information beyond the few things I have mentioned already about Rev. Smith, but there was a somewhat older contemporary of his whose story is quite helpful. 1 Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Pantheon, 1999). Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

2 Charles Grandison Finney was, like Smith, a New School, intellectual, abolitionist, and revivalist Presbyterian preacher. Finney has been called the father of modern revivalism. His New School Presbyterianism led him to promote social reforms, like the abolition of slavery and equal education for women and African Americans. In 1835 he began teaching at Oberlin College in Ohio, which was among the very first American colleges to accept women and blacks as students. He later served as president of Oberlin from 1851 to 1866, which overlaps with Courtney Smith s time here in Grand Rapids. From Oberlin s early years, its faculty and students participated together with people of the town in biracial efforts to help fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad and openly resisted the Fugitive Slave Act. 2 Finney s revivals employed innovations of the time and included women praying out loud in public meetings of mixed gender; the anxious seat a place where those considering becoming Christians could sit to receive prayer; and public censure of individuals by name in sermons and prayers. Finney popularized the idea of the altar call in order to sign up his converts for the abolition movement. 3 And our Courtney Smith wanted to come to Westminster, in part, so that he could preach revivals at the Army camp. Now, we don t know for sure, but in many ways, Smith s convictions paralleled Charles Finney s, so on the creepy, uncomfortable end of the scale, it s possible that Courtney Smith also publically censured people by name from his pulpit. And on the other end of the scale, he was at the cutting edge of promoting women s standing, of the movement to end slavery, and of straight-forwardly enlisting people to enter those righteous causes. And on both ends of the scale, he believed in a gospel that had a personal claim on your individual life. Surely, part of what went on in those revivals was that believers would go up to the front and commit themselves to Christ, in front of those who knew their names and who would hear their names spoken. I find him quite compelling. When I was just beginning seminary, there was a dichotomy in the church. Let s call it personal piety versus social gospel. There seemed to be those who believed that the gospel was about personal salvation and personal piety and that the gospel had no role in politics or social issues. Jesus came to save individuals through the gift of salvation and the call to personal transformation and morality and that was it. And on the other side there seemed to be those who believed that the gospel had everything to do with politics and social issues, who saw the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women s movement, and social causes as essential parts of the gospel s liberating message. And they were reluctant to preach about personal morality or salvation, believing that those messages made it too easy to ignore the larger social message and political force of the gospel. And at that time I really didn t find many people in the middle or who embraced both ends of that false dichotomy in the way that I believe Courtney Smith did. At least I didn t find them until I was in the Moveable Feast. But I have learned that it is a false dichotomy. The gospel is social and political with far- 2 Wikipedia, Charles Grandison Finney, citing Barry Hankins. The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), p Op. Cit., citing the following: Lists of the various types of new measures are identified mostly by sources critical of Finney, such as Bennet Tyler, Asahel Nettleton: Life and Labors, ed. Andrew Bonar (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1996), pp ; Letters of Rev. Dr. [Lyman] Beecher and the Rev. Mr. Nettleton on the New Measures in Conducting Revivals of Religion with a Review of a Sermon by Novanglus (New York: G & C Carvill, 1828), pp ; and Charles Hodge, "Dangerous Innovations," in Biblical Repertory and Theological Review, 5: 3 (July 1833), pp , hosted at University of Michigan, available online (accessed March 2008). Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 2 of 5 February 9, 2014

3 reaching implications for how societies and governments should be formed and be faithful. And the gospel is a liberating word for individuals that can free them from personal demons and oppression in a way that can only rightly be called salvation. As I said, I think we are quite at home with an intellectual abolitionist like Courtney Smith, and maybe less so with his revivalism. But one reason that, as forward-looking, expansive, and cutting-edge as we sometimes seem to be and as large a social conscience as we may at times exhibit one reason that we don t tip completely over onto the side of the pure (and let s say arid ) social gospel is that we sing this hymn, and others like it, a lot. Be Thou My Vision comes from centuries before Europe even found its way to North America, let alone before we created these revivals. The original text is from 700 CE; it was translated from the ancient Irish by Mary Elizabeth Byrne in 1905 and put to regular meter (versified) by Eleanor Hull in Mary Byrne and Eleanor Hull were both Irish scholars. 4 And it is set to a soaring, stirring Irish melody. Here is a bit of Mary Elizabeth Byrne s original translation. Be thou my vision O Lord of my heart None other is aught but the King of the seven heavens. Be thou my meditation by day and night. May it be thou that I behold even in my sleep. Be thou my speech, be thou my understanding. Be thou with me, be I with thee Be thou my father, be I thy son. Mayst thou be mine, may I be thine. That s a revivalist s prayer. Take my life. Take all of me. Let you be all that I am. This is a revivalist s hymn. And it s a hymn we love. And I believe it says something about our prayers for ourselves at our best, about our longing to be faithful individuals. Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art Thou my best thought by day or by night Waking or sleeping Thy presence my light Be thou my wisdom and Thou my true word I ever with Thee, and Thou with me, Lord. The text puts us squarely in the personal relationship, personal morality, personal piety end of the gospel spectrum. It s an appropriate extension of Courtney Smith s identity and ministry as is Camp Henry. Camp is a place apart from the usual flow of life that allows us some distance and perspective and a context to be moved and inspired. 4 Linda Jo McKim, ed., The Presbyterian Hymnal Companion (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox, 1993), p Note too: The hymn s tune, Slane, is also a very ancient Irish ballad about a place called Slane, where it is said in the fifth century the first fires of Easter were lit by St. Patrick in defiance of the pagan king. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 3 of 5 February 9, 2014

4 But we don t go for the altar call, either here or at camp. And I think we don t because we find it manipulative and even emotionally coercive. We don t like that old means to the end. The means is actually not that old the altar call is a nineteenth-century invention. But we do like the ends: individual lives committed to the gospel s work, people called by name to follow; we certainly favor that just not the manipulative way that some take to get there. I came from the utter social gospel end of the scale. Surely I had deep, personal longings for God in my life. I wrote songs that were prayers long before I became a person of faith I had longings for God, but at the start my faith was articulated primarily as an intellectual and social gospel. It s hard to put my finger on exactly what my faith was, but something was missing. I ve found it s a little like Fred Craddock, who said, When I was 12 years old, all I wanted to be was a preacher. When I was a bit older, all I wanted was to be a good preacher. Now, as I am an old man, all I want to be is a Christian. 5 And that desire hasn t come from a camp meeting, unless worship here counts and sometimes I think it does; unless the Moveable Feast counts as a camp meeting and sometimes I think it does. But I don t feel it s come from an altar call. It s come from the winsome power of the gospel. I could always understand that God so loved the world, but I didn t always see that I was part of that world that God loved. But after hearing my colleagues in the Moveable Feast for a couple of years, after hearing a whole and winsome gospel that embraced and expressed both piety and social witness, I found myself writing on the Incarnation, about why God the Immortal, Invisible would enter this world as an infant lying in a feeding trough for animals and this is what spilled out of my fingers at the time. The Incarnation means that each of us, each of us, is loved by God. God became a particular, individual human being. In that singular human life, God claimed all flesh as God s own. God comes into our flesh, our measly, ludicrous little flesh, God comes into our world, this life, the one we know, this very life, and God embraces it wholly from birth to death. God enters into frail flesh and says, This flesh is of ultimate value. It is as if God were saying, This is flesh of My flesh, bone of My bone. We try to carve out some place in our lives where God isn t, some place where we are in charge, independent, where it s just about us, where we can be solitary, unitary. I know I try to cling to some space where I can be just, you know, a little alienated, a little callous, a little greedy save a little space to be me, without having to be God s beloved child. So, sometimes we take offense at God s becoming human, like us, by this sullying of the divine being, by God s crawling around in this mess of a life, this manger, this feeding trough, even though it may be ours. We re offended because when God gets this close, this close to us and our stuff, God makes a claim on our lives, on every smidgen of our lives. It s as if I heard God call my name. I had a friend in the Oakland Church, one of the many parish associates who worked with me there. Bob was a preacher and was part of that era in the life of the church that was polarized over the question of personal piety or social witness, and like me he leaned to the side of social witness. But he also told an amazingly gracious story about himself. I was preaching one Sunday about a new catechism that was being developed at the time. 5 Fred B. Craddock, The Collected Sermons of Fred B. Craddock, Kindle Edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), p Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 4 of 5 February 9, 2014

5 The first question of the catechism was: Who are you? The answer was: I am a child of God. So, I had the congregation recite that affirmation: I am a child of God. And then, I asked them to put their names in there, to say, I, Bob, am a child of God. I, Mary, I, Chandler, Bob told me later that he was really okay and comfortable and unmoved, cruising through the sermon, saying, I am a child of God, until he put his name in the equation. He said, Wow. It was a challenge; I had to believe it about me. And all of a sudden, it seemed real to me. I am a child of God. I am a child of God. Revivals aren t just for converts. Yesterday morning at the Presbytery meeting at Eastminster Church, as is my wont to sin, I was sitting in worship, frustrated and disappointed in the sermon, pulling my hair out. And then came Communion led by Ann Conklin, former staff member here, pastor there. She was up front with the bread and cup. She said my name, just as they would have in an old revival meeting. I came to the front of the line. She said my name. She said, Chandler, the Body of Christ broken for you. She called me by name. That is the great full promise of the Incarnation, that you and I would not just become part of something big that God s doing in the world, that we would not just get to participate in what God is doing to love and transform human society into the Kingdom of God and that would be plenty good, but it s more than that. The promise of the Incarnation is that we also find that we ourselves are loved. God so loved the world, absolutely God loved the world, and wants us to join God in loving the world. But we are also part of that world that God loves. I think we need to keep singing this hymn and others like it that speak of God s intimacy and personal power. I think it keeps us in touch with the God who loves us, who wants every smidgen of us. Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art. Thou my best thought by day or by night Waking or sleeping Thy presence my light Be thou my wisdom and Thou my true word I ever with Thee, and Thou with me, Lord. Let the people say, Amen. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 5 of 5 February 9, 2014