Little Gidding quiet dayAddress 1: Let all the world in every corner singLetting God be God

At Morning Prayer just a few moments ago we opened our lips to sing God’s praise, and we used George Herbert’s words to do so, as we will throughout today. Why Herbert? Because of his connection to this place, via his extended correspondence with Nicholas Ferrar, and the latter’s critical role in ensuring that Herbert’s words were preserved and shared so that we may enjoy them now and, perhaps, that they may lead us closer to God.

Let all the world in every corner sing,my God and King!The heavens are not too high, God's praise may thither fly;the earth is not too low,God's praises there may grow.Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

Let all the world in every corner sing,my God and King!The church with psalms must shout:no door can keep them out.But, more than all, the heart must bear the longest part.Let all the world in every corner sing,my God and King!

The title of this first address is ‘Letting God be God’ because whatever else a hymn is for, it is – usually at least – an outpouring of worship from us, God’s creatures, to our creator. When we sing, we may be

only a poor echo of the worship in heaven, but it is the best we have. When we sing, we pray twice, as Augustine put it. I gather what he actually said is that ‘when a man sings well he prays twice’ but for the moment we shall imagine that it is not the quality of the singing, but the act of singing at all that enlarges our prayers and sends them heavenwards.

When we sing, we engage our whole selves, body, mind, heart and soul. It is effortful. We find ourselves breathing more deeply, enunciating words more intentionally, needing to feel the ground beneath our feet more firmly, more conscious of our posture, the sound that we are making, and our relationship to the whole body of Christ as our fellow members sing around us. Since singing is a trans-cultural practice (in other words, all cultures do it) it is also something that unites us with our fellow human beings of different nations and faiths. This is no small thing. Singing is a holistic experience in every sense.

Interestingly, I read a piece of research last week which demonstrated that singing, especially in ensemble, releases oxytocin, the hormone associated with love.

So, if we sing, if we sing to God, we engage our whole selves in praise, not only our intellectual and cognitive selves, but our whole selves. This is the sacrifice of praise that we hear about in the Eucharistic liturgy and in the beautiful hymn often used for harvest festivals, For the Beauty of the Earth – interestingly, in John Rutter’s memorable setting it is changed to ‘joyful hymn of praise’. Make of that what you will.

So we come before God, just as we are, and we offer God our whole embodied selves, singing words about God’s glory as our brains respond to the bodily and cognitive experience by releasing hormones that make us feel like we are in love. How does this shape our

relationship with God: when we sing, we may be performing a relationship of love that already exists, but in a very real sense we are shaping and growing that relationship through the very act of singing. And, whatever St Augustine says, you don’t have to be a great singer for this to work.

When we sing, we do so in our creatureliness, our materiality, our embodied and emotional selves, coming into the presence of the One who made us and is worthy of our love and our devotion: we are OK with the fact that God is God and we are God’s people, and we are engaging in a process that not only reflects, but shapes our whole experience of that relationship.

If you are accustomed to the daily offices, you will know that they are punctuated by the doxology: glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Doxology is just a Greek word that means words of glory.

The doxology keeps coming back in the offices, like a refrain, and the implication is that whatever you’ve just said, it’s going to be right and appropriate to finish by singing praise to the eternal Trinity. This can sometimes be jarring – Matins and Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer don’t change much depending on the time of year, and the monthly cycle of psalms simply goes through the book of psalms (the bible’s hymn book) in its biblical order. So on certain days of the month you can easily have one of the more violent psalms, or the most profound laments and cries o desolation, and still be asked to sing ‘Glory be… ‘ straight afterwards.

It is jarring, but also strangely reassuring. It’s a way of saying, God is still God, even when I’m having a bad day, or a bad year. God is still God, even when I hate the people who are giving me a hard time, even when everything is collapsing around me. God is still God even

when all I can do is fall on my knees and cry for help, begging for mercy. God is still God even when I’m no longer sure that God understands the true depth of my suffering.

Because who God is doesn’t depend on how we are each feeling at any given moment. God is God, and God is glorious and worthy of our praise and worship, every moment of every day. Actually, it is precisely because God does not depend on our feel-good factor to be praiseworthy that we can, in fact, fall on our knees before him asking for mercy.

As the doxology reminds us that God is God, and that we mustn’t remake God in our own image, it also reminds us that instead, we must be continually remade in his image – an image in which mutual love, creativity, sacrifice, blessing and unity in diversity are the hallmarks not just of individuals but of churches, maybe even, in God’s ultimate purposes, of the whole of the human race. This is what the doxology looks like in the extended worship of real life lived in God’s service – again, we will be returning to this theme later.

Doxology, praise, worship – this is a kind of theology. It’s a kind of theology that lets God be God, and that lets us be us, that invites us to be drawn into the life of the Trinity that is all about love, and difference, and self-giving, and creative enjoyment of one another. It’s a sort of theology that allows us to say something to God and about God – it is the most immediate form of theology we have.

That’s why it’s so apt that the very Trinitarian formula that we use to praise God in his vastness and greatness is also an expression of all the ways that that mystery has been made known to us – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are also our experience of God through history and in our own lives. The very doxology that reminds us to let God be God also reminds us of all the ways that God always has been, is now, and always will be intimately concerned with his creation. We know what

it is to be a child of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus, sharing our humanity, and we know what it is to have God within us, and breathing life into us, into the church, and into the whole universe.

If doxology is a form of theology, should we be more choosy about the theology we allow into our hymns? Well, we may return to that in one of the later addresses. But even the most apparently contentless worship song says something about God and our relationship with God.

Many hymns, of course, heap huge amounts of content into their worship: How sweet the name of Jesus sounds springs to mind:

Jesus, my shepherd, guardian/brother, friend, my Prophet, Priest, and King, my Lord, my Life, my Way, my End, accept the praise I bring.

Another Greek word for you: apophatic. Apophatic theology is the heaping up of descriptive images and metaphors for God, none of which tell the whole story, but each of which may contribute to it. Eventually the multiplying images start to contradict one another, and you may be left not with a neat compilation but with what the mystics called ‘the darkness of God’ – the unknowability that is left when you realise that language has failed in its attempt truly to define the divine. The process of getting there has drawn you closer to God than you ever thought possible, like the long walk to the foot of a huge mountain, and yet when you get there you realise that the mountain is so tall that, standing at the foot of it, you cannot take it all in. That is letting God be God, and it is where many of our greatest and most beloved hymns end up:

How weak the effort of my heart, how cold my warmest thought;

but when I see you as you are, I'll praise you as I ought.

Or, more poetically, the words of the great John Mason:

How shall I sing that MajestyWhich angels do admire?Let dust in dust and silence lie;Sing, sing, ye heavenly choir.Thousands of thousands stand aroundThy throne, O God most high;Ten thousand times ten thousand soundThy praise; but who am I?

Enlighten with faith’s light my heart,Inflame it with love’s fire;Then shall I sing and bear a partWith that celestial choir.I shall, I fear, be dark and cold,With all my fire and light;Yet when Thou dost accept their gold,Lord, treasure up my mite.

How great a being, Lord, is Thine,Which doth all beings keep!Thy knowledge is the only lineTo sound so vast a deep.Thou art a sea without a shore,A sun without a sphere;Thy time is now and evermore,Thy place is everywhere.

So, whatever else hymns are about, or are for, they are – generally – about letting God be God. And they do this not only by their explicit doctrinal content, but more by the way that they engage us in all our

creaturely embodied selves in worshipful focus on our maker – they are a journey towards God in worship. They help us love God more.

One of the most challenging commissions I’ve fulfilled as a hymn writer was from Ely Cathedral, who wanted a new hymn for their science festival a few months ago. I offer it to you now as an example of my own journey through the wonder of the material expression of God’s creativity and our human love of learning and understanding to the realisation that God is God and we are just human, and that this is right, and indeed wonderful:

Praise for the depths of space,its endless scope and scale:in such a vast embraceour words and numbers fail.For what are we,that mortal mindshould seek and findinfinity?

Praise for the rules that showthe patterning of time,creation’s ebb and flowexpressed in reason’s rhyme.Can these great lawscontain our awe,a formulafor wonder’s cause?

Praise for the complex codeseach spiral strand conveys,as chemistry explodesto life in myriad ways.

Can we comparewhat’s ours aloneif we are knownthrough all we share?

Praise for the drive to know;from human nature springsa need to learn and grow,to understand all things.Yet wisdom’s prizeis never won:from all that’s donenew questions rise.

Praise to the one whose Wordbreathed purpose into chance,for whom all matter stirredto join creation’s dance.For love made knownin every thingin praise we singto You alone.

If you’re not sure what to do in the next 45 minutes or so of silence, here are some ideas:

Take a hymn book, and choose a hymn of praise that you have found uplifting to sing. Look at the words, meditate on them, see if you can memorise them.

If you wish, focus just on one line, one that perhaps has always resonated with you, and dwell with it a while.

If you are feeling brave, pick a tune you love, and have a go at putting pen to paper to write a verse that expresses something of who God is.

Address 2: The God of love my shepherd isThe God who walks with us

Let’s sing again:

The God of love my shepherd is,and he that doth me feed;while he is mine and I am his,what can I want or need?

2 He leads me to the tender grass,where I both feed and rest;then to the streams that gently pass:in both I have the best.

3 Or ifI stray, he doth convert,and bring my mind in frame,and all this not for my desert,but for his holy name.

4 Yea, in death's shady black abodewell may I walk, not fear;for thou art with me, and thy rodto guide, thy staff to bear.

5 Surely thy sweet and wondrous loveshall measure all my days;and, as it never shall remove,so neither shall my praise.

Our hymnals are not short of metrical renderings of Psalm 23. This one, again, is Herbert’s, and it’s not even the best known. We all know The Lord’s my shepherd, that’s sung to Crimond, and I guess most of are also more than familiar with The King of Love my shepherd

is, whose line ‘O what transport of delight’ lent a title to a Flanders and Swann song about London buses. More about that later, too.

I wonder which is your favourite? With words so well known as these, it is their very familiarity which assures them a continuing place in the consciousness not only of churchgoers but also those who are never part of regular worship. This is certainly true of Crimond, as it for All Things Bright and Beautiful, Jerusalem, and Abide with me – though we have sport to thank for the latter two, as well (rugby, and football, respectively).

Familiarity may breed contempt, too, and I have to confess that after over 400 funerals, around 200 baptisms and around the same number of weddings, my tolerance for All things Bright and Beautiful is not what it once was. Yet even as my own heart sinks at these over familiar hymns, and thank God for them, for they provide a means by which a disparate bunch of people, gathered either in sorrow or joy, may raise their voices (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) and, just for those two or three minutes, tap into something familiar, perhaps from childhood, that meant something to them once.

Hymns can reach the parts that other beers can’t reach, delving into the emotional recesses of childhood memories and associations with other gatherings. These hymns accrue a patina of association, layered emotion and memory that allows them to offer hospitality to people who would perhaps find themselves ill at ease in church – all the more so if there’s a body of people willing to hold the tune and give it some welly, providing a critical mass into which those on the outside might be attracted and in which they might find some support and solace.

I wonder what your favourite hymns are? For most people, they will be hymns that have been known for a long time, and carry the weight of memory and experience with them. One of my favourites is Dear Lord and Father of mankind, for the very particular reason that I had

my first ever mildly charismatic experience while singing that hymn in a school assembly when I was twelve. Really. Even today, the thought of that hymn reminds me of the warmth of love that was present that day in the singing, at a time in my life when a lot of things were confusing and difficult (I was twelve, after all).

I read recently that this particular hymn has frequently been voted as the nation’s favourite hymn. The tune, Repton, written by Parry, bears some significant responsibility for that. It is a yearning tune, the long pedal the spills over even in the second line, the rising sequence in lines 3 and 4, and the longer rise to the climactic top note and gentle relaxation in the repeated last line. It’s a masterpiece. Also responsible for the hymn’s enduring belovedness is the way it speaks about human experience of turmoil and comfort:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,till all our strivings cease;take from our souls the strain and stress,and let our ordered lives confessthe beauty of thy peace.

5 Breathe through the heats of our desirethy coolness and thy balm;let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,O still, small voice of calm!

Because of its belovedness, and also perhaps because it is a hymn about which I personally feel warm, I choose to borrow its tune when I was asked to write a hymn for All Souls. Many parishes now hold an annual service around all souls tide to which they invite all the families of those whose funerals have taken place over the past year or more. It’s one of those services to which people come who might not usually come to church. You probably don’t want to choose all funeral hymns,

but you want something that will wrap the congregation in a warm blanket of familiarity, while offering a set of words that is bespoke for the occasion. A well worn and well loved tune can do that very nicely. This is what I wrote:

We place into your hands, O Lord,the souls of those we love:we trust your promise is not vainthat all, through grace and faith, may gaina place in heaven above.

We place into your hands, O Lord,this world and all its care,The grief and hurt and pain we feel,when desperation makes us kneelin silent, wordless prayer.

We place into your hands, O Lord,These burdens that we bear:Each sorrow and each past regret,And ask that in our hearts you’ll setyour peace beyond compare.

We place into your hands, O Lord,our future and our past:And as you bless us on our way,and travel with us night and day,your love will hold us fast.

This tune, and its original words, by Whittier, and all their emotional resonances, are available to me as an adult because they were introduced to me at an early age and were part of my childhood – perhaps this is the case for some of you, too. Given that for many people the hymns they know are known through school assemblies,

and given that one of the most popular wedding hymns is now ‘One more step along the world I go’, I am slightly anxious about what wedding couples will choose to sing in, say, ten years time, when there are no more memories of hymn singing at school.

More crucially, though, if these texts and these tunes are not any more being written on the hearts of the current generation, what is the well on which they will draw when they need some words to speak into times of sorrow and joy? Much popular music is ephemeral, and only a small proportion of lyrics survive in the memory once the song is no longer being broadcast and downloaded. Where will the words and melodies come from that can wrap a grieving congregation up like a blanket, that can nourish a soul that has been starved of ways to make sense of the world? Where are the words that can express the joy of human love and new life?

Hymns are also the key repository for the most basic theology. It is said that if you want to know what a catholic believes, you look in the catechism of the Catholic Church. And if you want to know what an Anglican believes, you look in the liturgy. If you want to know what a Methodist believes, you look through their hymn book. Perhaps in the Church of England we should take more seriously the Methodist approach.

We remember what we sing far better than what we say, and better still than what we only hear. Metre, melody and rhyme all help to set the words and what they mean more firmly in the recesses of the mind, so we would do well to look carefully at what it is we are giving people.

The vast majority of the population of this country – churchgoers included - learn their incarnational theology from Christmas carols. We are blessed in having some rather wonderful carols still well

known and still speaking in as fresh a voice as the day they were written:

‘And man, at war with man, hears not the love song which they bring; O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.’

And even the much maligned Away in a manger explicitly connects the baby in the manger with the risen and ascended Christ who promised to be with us always, to the end of the age.

One thing I used to do each advent when I was a parish priest is to make tiny origami stars out of paper, printed in even tiny letters with a single line from a carol – a different line each year. I would make several hundred of these over the course of advent (which was a great way of making myself slow down a bit) and then give them out like party favours to everyone who came to one of the special Christmas services. It was a special moment each Christmas to see people curiously turning the stars over and over in their hands, tracing the words, and trying to remember which carol they were from. ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight’ speaks just as profoundly into our hopes and fears in 2017 as it did into those in Victorian times.

The most powerful of our Christmas carols go beyond the telling of the story of Jesus’ birth, and begin to reflect the reality of the world and human experience that made the incarnation a necessary stage in God’s saving purposes. The hymns that speak of cold and snow use a climate-specific winter metaphor for the more profound truth that a cold earth needs warming in the love of God, and hearts of stone need melting into human hearts that beat with love for God and for our neighbours. We learn our theology from our hymns: we learn about God, and about ourselves, and about how God has related to us and to all creation throughout salvation history.

Of course, some hymns were written for the very purpose of teaching sound doctrine. Mrs Alexander, wife of an Irish Bishop in the 19th Century, wrote several hundred hymns of which we sing now only a handful. Those we do sing come, from the most part, from the series of hymns she wrote for the children in the confirmation class she was teaching. In attempt to help them learn and reflect on the creed, she wrote a hymn for each and every line. The very first line of the creed is the inspiration behind the (again, much maligned) All things bright and beautiful, while Once in Royal David’s City and There is a green hill each reflect lines further on in the creed on the birth and passion of Christ.

But whether our hymns are aiming to teach or not, they do soak into our bones, taking up residence in our memories and shaping and nourishing our faith, providing us with a vocabulary for expressing otherwise inexpressible truths about God and, sometimes about ourselves.

Again, if you’re not sure how to use the next 45 minutes, you might like to:

Find a Christmas carol that you know you like, and really look at and enjoy the words. Ask yourself what this carol is saying about God, and about humanity. Pray using those words, and see where it takes you.

Think of your favourite hymn from childhood, and dwell with it, letting your emotions respond to the memory. Again, pray through what you feel and remember.

Think of a more recent song – perhaps something that you think might have been written in the last twenty years or so. Are there tunes, or turns of phrase, that you think have the potential to seep into the bones like some of the best hymns from generations past? Dwell with those, and with the theology that

they explore.

Address 3: Teach me my God and kingthe ordinary and the sacred

1 Teach me, my God and King,in all things thee to see;and what I do in anythingto do it as for thee.

2 A man that looks on glass,on it may stay his eye;or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,and then the heaven espy.

3 All may of thee partake;nothing can be so meanwhich, with this tincture, For thy sake,will not grow bright and clean.

4 A servant with this clausemakes drudgery divine;who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,makes that and the action fine.

5 This is the famous stonethat turneth all to gold;for that which God doth touch and owncannot for less be told.

In his short and popular book, Do nothing to change your life, Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford, tells the story of when the pavement outside his house was re-tarmacked. Two days later, with the smell of the fresh tarmac scarcely gone, he walked out of his front drive, and

saw, nestling in a tiny crack in the new surface, an even tinier plant, its seed presumably blown by the wind and settled in what seemed like the most inhospitable and hopeless place. And yet there it had started to grow. He tells of how in that moment he was overcome by the wonder of such an ordinary thing, so much so that he felt like kneeling down right there and praising God. He then admits that he did not in fact kneel down, but that he wishes he had. We are not good, he says, at noticing the awe-inspiring beauty of simple things. We do not stop and look, we do not see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

The hymn we just sang, again by Herbert, reflects a little on this theme. We may object to the verse about drudgery, and we may be right – for Herbert came from money, and was never a servant, and it is one thing to see God at work in one’s own drudgery, but quite another to see virtue in other people’s poverty. The verse that always strikes me in this hymn, however, is the previous one.

A man that looks on glass,on it may stay his eye;or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,and then the heaven espy.

The house I grew up was a little terraced house in a small town up north, and it still had Georgian glass in the sash windows. I remember as a child being fascinated by the way I could use the imperfections in the glass itself – the tiny bubbles and swirls – to focus my gaze on the glass, and then in a blink, look straight through it as if it were not there, to the street outside. This is how I always heard this verse of Herbert’s. But there are any number of alternative readings: it might be the stained glass of a church window, in which one may see the stories of scripture told in pictures, and in which one may choose to see the artistry, or to see the God behind the story. Equally, one might look at the glass as a looking glass, a mirror – you can look on your

own reflection and see yourself, your very human self, and your flaws and gifts as if they define you, or you can learn to look at yourself as it were through the eyes of God, and see in your own face the face of a child of God a beloved child of God, in whom the image of God resides. All three of these possible meanings invite us to look through, or beyond, to see what is behind or above the flat surface, and to see with the eyes of faith, hope, and love. It is this same heightened sight that will allow us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Perhaps this accounts for some of the enduring popularity of Eleanor Farjeon’s hymn ‘Morning has Broken’, delighting as it does in the sensory world of an early morning, and connecting it theologically to the new life of Easter:

Morning has broken,like the first morningBlackbird has spoken,like the first birdPraise for the singing,praise for the morningPraise for the springingfresh from the word

Sweet the rain's new fall,sunlit from heavenLike the first dewfall,on the first grassPraise for the sweetnessof the wet gardenSprung in completenesswhere his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight,mine is the morning

Born of the one light,Eden saw playPraise with elation,praise every morningGod's recreationof the new day

There is another aspect, though, to the way that hymns might invite us to connect the ordinary to the extraordinary, and that it by the language itself. Hymns straddle an interesting boundary: they are not, most of them, primarily poems (although Herbert himself never wrote words intended to be sung as hymns – their music was added afterwards). Hymns cannot afford to be *too* poetic, for they are sung at singing speed, by ordinary folk, not pored over at leisure and with the aid of a dictionary, at least in the way that they are primarily used. I felt I was justified to road test some fun metaphors in my science hymn: framing the laws of physics as ‘creation’s ebb and flow expressed in reason’s rhyme’ is playful and evocative, but hopefully without obfuscation. The most poetic hymns are works of huge beauty and depth – How shall I sing that majesty is a case in point – but the vast majority of hymns use a majority of ordinary words, common speech, in order to create a doorway wide enough to allow many people to enter with ease, while at the same time using structure, rhyme and rhythm, eloquence of turns of phrase, to lift them up a step from the language of the street.

Like the language of the liturgy, hymns are to be ‘understanded of the people’ and yet are supposed to enable those same people to have a glimpse of heaven, to sing with the heavenly choir. This is a fine line to tread: simplicity can be bald and unappealing, or it can be disarmingly direct; complexity can draw one more deeply into the mystery of God, or it can obfuscate and alienate. Hymns are like the glass on which our

eye may stay, or which may allow us to see through them into the dazzling darkness of God.

Rhyme, rhythm, metre, and music all create a level of credibility and make a hymn more memorable; this brings its own set of responsibilities.

My children were very keen on the Lego movie when it first came out, and there is a moment early on in the film that captures this brilliantly: a prophecy is made and spoken in declamatory tones, the last few lines of which run:

with a noble army at the helm, this Master Builder will thwart the Kragle and save the realm, and be the greatest, most interesting, most important person of all times. All this is true because it rhymes.

In the movie, the prophecy turns out to be a fake, and yet it drives the plot and the development of the characters and, in the end, gains a level of more profound truth. The rhyme gave it a ring of false credibility, however, and when we dare to put pen to paper to write a hymn, we do so in fear and trembling less we write a lie that will be sung as truth.

This is all the more the case for congregational singing. A poet can offer their words to take or leave, and nobody has to believe them, but a hymn is inflicted on a whole congregation and it sells that congregation not only a theology but a sensibility that will borrow a ring of truth from is rhymes, its metre, the way it scans and slips easily off the tongue. All these lend it a credibility that it would not have otherwise, and may not deserve. As a hymn writer, this occasionally keeps me up at night.

A new hymn to an old tune borrows credibility from the very notes to which it is sung, especially if it is familiar and well regarded – it may even in some cases borrow all the beautiful resonances from that tune’s original words – like a dwarf riding the shoulder of a giant. This can be playful, or it may be strategic. When I wrote the hymn about science for Ely cathedral, the Canon who commissioned it asked for the tune ‘Love unknown’ and asked if I might be able to slip in a reference to the original, beautiful words, by Samuel Crossman – hence the hymn ends

‘For love made known in every thing, in praise we sing to You alone.’

More strategically, I borrowed the wonderful sombre tune King’s Lynn, usually sung with G K Chesterton’s extraordinary words, O God of earth and altar, written a century ago, in another time of political and social turmoil and fear. I wanted GCK’s credibility for my own hymn, because I was writing in response to some of the disasters that befell the nation and the world last year, and, frankly, I didn’t feel that I had the gravitas on my own to carry it off. But my dwarf of a hymn could perch on the giant of GKC’s profound, timely and moving words:

O God of earth and altar,bow down and hear our cry,our earthly rulers falter,our people drift and die;the walls of gold entomb us,the swords of scorn divide,take not thy thunder from us,but take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,from lies of tongue and pen,from all the easy speechesthat comfort cruel men,

from sale and profanationof honour and the sword,from sleep and from damnation,deliver us, good Lord!

My own hymn, which we may hear a little later, was a poor shadow of this, but I hope GKC did not turn too much in his grave when I felt I needed to borrow a little of his gravitas.

This reflection that began with the ordinary and the sacred has taken us to a place where it’s right to reflect on the power of words: the use of these very ordinary tools of our daily life to effect a shift into the world of the sacred, even the mysterious. Their capacity to articulate truth in ways that will be remembered, their potential for helping to shape the faith journey of whole generations of churchgoers. The huge power that resides in the crafting of language that performs our public faith so effectively that it defines our faith in our private world. The power to direct a congregation to the glass, or to the heaven beyond.

If you’re not sure what to do in the next 45 minutes you might like to try:

Meditating on Herbert’s words with which we began: the glass and the heaven beyond, and reflecting on where this has been true for you, and when it has been out of reach.

Reflect on your relationship with words, and your own struggle, if you do indeed struggle, to express the depth of truth about yourself, about the world, about God -and perhaps about the power you feel you have, and the power you may feel you lack.

Try putting pen to paper, and seeing if you dare to draw on this power of rhythm and rhyme, and a tune that matters, to perform something of your own faith.

Address 4: King of glory, king of peaceDiscipleship and mission

1 King of glory, King of peace,I will love thee;and, that love may never cease,I will move thee.Thou hast granted my request,thou hast heard me;thou didst note my working breast,thou hast spared me.

2 Wherefore with my utmost artI will sing thee,and the cream of all my heartI will bring thee.Though my sins against me cried,thou didst clear me,and alone, when they replied,thou didst hear me.

3 Seven whole days, not one in seven,I will praise thee;in my heart, though not in heaven,I can raise thee.Small it is, in this poor sortto enrol thee:e'en eternity's too shortto extol thee.

Louis Weil’s beautiful book about worship and life articulates the truth that the worship that takes place in church is only one aspect of our homage to God – he calls this, ‘intensive worship’. More important, he says, and the trajectory of that intensive worship, is the worship

that goes on in Christian life the rest of the time: extensive worship, the worship that extends from the church door into the street and beyond, that endures for more than an hour on a Sunday morning and comprises the totality of our life lived in service to God.

We see the same when we read the letter to the Hebrews: chapter upon chapter of detailed theological exposition on how we are to understand the atonement that Christ achieved in the frame of reference left over from the Old Testament’s sacrificial system – that’s all intensive worship. Then there’s a great corner-turning ‘therefore’ and the remainder of the letter is an exhortation to living lives that show the fruits of redemption, lives of kindness and peace and the building of community – that is extensive worship.

So for this last address we turn to the dismissal, often accompanied by the singing of a hymn, and the reality that whatever we have done in church – however much we may have drawn close to God in word and sacrament, the real work of honouring God is just beginning, and will continue in all that we do that day, that week, that month. It may well be true what they say: as long as you’ve got a good first hymn and a good last hymn, nobody will care what happens in between. But the crucial role of the hymn in effecting that ‘therefore’ that sends us on our way and connects our worship of God in church with our worship of God in the world, should not be overlooked. There are many hymns that in one way or another perform the dismissal, that unpack the commission to ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ – I even used that as the last line of a hymn once, and I’m sure the main reason people like that hymn is because of the familiar final line….

Hope of our calling: Spirit-filled, unbound,Old joys remembered and new purpose found,Our call refreshed by sacrament and word,We go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Some of the most enduring hymns take seriously the notion that we take worship with us when we leave. They give us something to take away – some additional food for the journey, some commission that we can apply to the life we will be living in the coming days, some affirmation of our own sense of vocation, or a challenge to become more than we are at the moment. It is this that gives many hymns their sense of trajectory and purpose – they are not static statements of faith, but dynamic performances of faith as it is lived, in lives that do not stand still, but are constantly confronting and overcoming new hurdles and are invited to bring the gospel to a waiting world.

In these days of church decline and corresponding diocesan vision statements and strategy documents, the forward trajectory has a high profile. We are more aware than ever in my memory of the need to connect the life of the church with the life of the world, and yet there can seem to be a huge gulf between them: even at the level of language, the words and images that have nourished the church for centuries carry less and less currency in a world that no longer easily recognises the words of scripture or liturgy, and has a smaller and smaller repertoire of hymns at its disposal to draw on too. If Flanders and Swann were writing their songs now, they could not rely on their audience recognising ‘the transport of delight’ as a resonant phrase – it would simply not be available for borrowing.

Some things remain. Florence Welch (Florence and the Machine) and Lady Gaga are among the current well known artists who are able to draw on the language of Christianity in their lyrics. But these are becoming few and far between. If we cannot see the language of worship to escaping into the world, we can see the language and reference points of the world finding their way into our worship. John Bell’s songs are hard to sing partly because their linguistic register is not what we are used to in worship, but also because he is willing to

bring into church subjects that we’ve not felt able to sing about before God before. Which is odd, because the psalms themselves are graphic in their willingness to sing about all sorts and conditions of human experience.

Often I’m asked to write a hymn because there isn’t one yet that speaks into a particular contemporary situation, or because some corporate, liturgical response is required for a situation that feels like uncharted territory.

One such commission I undertook was for a hymn that could be used at the commissioning service for all the parish safeguarding officers in a particular diocese. But how to deal with a subject so difficult, and sensitive, and important, in a way that did not diminish it and yet could be sung corporately without cringing or offence? This is what I wrote:

May this place be one of nurturewhere we all may come to knowhow your endless love sustains usas we live and move and grow.May we work to build your kingdomfull of truth and light and grace,living life in all its fullnessheld in one divine embrace.

From our negligence and failuresyou have called us to repent,drawing energy for actionfrom the voices of lament.As the secret hurts long hiddenmay at last be brought to light,may the truth unlock the freedomthat is every person’s right.

For you hold the broken heartedtill they learn to live again,and your justice stands like mountains,while your mercy falls like rainwhen the smallest child is valued,and the strong empower the weak,when each human life is hallowedand the unheard voices speak:

So with humble thanks we praise youand we lift to you in prayerall the people you are callingto this ministry of care.Give us wisdom, grace and courage,holding fast to all that’s good,seeing Christ in one anotherwe will love and serve our Lord.

This was not an easy set of words to write, as you can probably imagine. And they were words that were called upon to speak into some pretty dark places, and yet be filled with hope and purpose. Another hymn I wrote, last year, attempted to do the same: the one I mentioned earlier for which I borrowed GK Chesterton’s giant shoulders. It was a few days after the massacre at the gay night club in Orlando, and the day that Jo Cox was brutally murdered in her own constituency, and I couldn’t sleep. It felt as if the church didn’t have the words for this – sometimes wheeling out the old favourite hymns and collects is just what is needed, but sometimes new situations need new words. I’d seen so many clergy friends posting ‘what are we supposed to say on Sunday?’ ‘What’s the gospel in the light of all this?’ I tossed and turned that night for a while, and couldn’t sleep, so at 1.30am I came downstairs, poured a glass of wine, and wept as I

spent the next half hour writing these words, inspired by Jo Cox’s relentless quest for reconciliation and healing, and borrowing O God of earth and altar’s portentous tune:

O God of all salvationIn every darkened hourLook down at your creationWith pity and with power.In all the pain we’re seeing,For stranger as for friend,We’ll cling with all our beingTo love that cannot end.

O God, your loving passionIs deeper than our pain,Look down, and in compassionBring us to life again.When we are found despairing,When all seems lost to sin,We’ll hear your voice declaringThat love alone will win.

O God, when hate grows stronger,With fear to pave its way,The cry, ‘Lord, how much longer?’With broken hearts we pray.In all that is dismayingIn humankind’s freewill,We’ll join our voices, prayingThat love will triumph still.

O God, whose love will neverBe silenced, stalled or stilled,Set us to work wherever

There’re bridges to rebuild.We’ll take our life’s vocationTo make, like heav’n above,In this and every nationA kingdom built on love.

I thought that hymn might have one outing, on the Sunday following those events, but we are all now more aware, I think, that we are living in a world in which extremism, terror, division and hatred are part of our reality, and in which the language of kingdom building and reconciliation, and love wins is more urgent than ever. Hymns can give us a voice – a collective voice – at least as a church, for this commission.

Hymns have a rich and complex vocation: they bear the brunt of responsibility for the emotional impact of worship, they teach us the faith, they can restore faith that has been lost, and keep a tenuous connection to the faith of childhood when everything else about church seems meaningless, they draw together people and give them a common voice to say things that could not otherwise be said, they empower change and nurture the vocation of those who sing, and at their best they let us join in with the worship of heaven in such a way that we don’t end up no earthly use.

As I said in the first address this morning, doxology reminds us that we must be continually remade in God’s image – an image in which mutual love, creativity, sacrifice, blessing and unity in diversity are the hallmarks not just of individuals but of churches, maybe even, in God’s ultimate purposes, of the whole of the human race. This is what the doxology looks like in the extended worship of real life lived in God’s service.

If you would like a suggestion for this last period of silence, perhaps it might be to find a hymn that could empower you for what it means to

live in times like these: a hymn that is honest about the darkness in the world, and yet certain that love is stronger. A hymn that will send you out from here strengthened for service. If there isn’t a hymn yet that does this for you, well, maybe you should write one.