Songs of Christ
John Shuck
First Presbyterian Church
Elizabethton, Tennessee
August 11, 2013
First Book of the Odes of Solomon 7:22-8:7
Let the singers sing of the kindness of the Lord Most High,
Let them bring their psalms.
Let their hearts be as the day,
And their chants as the great beauty of the Lord.
Let there be no one that is without knowledge,
And who is without voice.
For he gave a mouth to creation,
To open the voice of the mouth toward him
And praise him.
Acknowledge his strength,
Demonstrate his kindness.
Open; open your hearts to the dancing joy of the Lord
And let your love abound from heart to lips:
In order to bring forth fruits for the Lord, a holy life,
And to speak with attention in his light.
Stand and be restored,
All of you who were once flattened.
Speak, you who were silent,
Because your mouth has been opened.
From now on be lifted up, you who were destroyed
Since your justice has been raised.
For the Right Hand of the Lord is with you all,
And she will be a helper for you.
Peace was prepared for you,
Before what may be your war.
It is good to be back.
I am grateful to the congregation for this time of leave. It was useful time in that I was able to spend a couple of those weeks in Montana helping my parents adjust to some changes in their life situations. Knowing that our congregation was well-served by Don Steele and by the elders, deacons and staff as well as our guest preachers allowed me that freedom to be present to my parents. I thank you for that.
For those of you who may be visiting, the leave time was for bereavement. Our son, Zach, suicided in the summer of 2012 and I didn’t want to take time off at the time, but I was ready at this time, about a year later. I will say honestly that the leave doesn’t feel like enough time. On the other hand I don’t think there is time enough in the universe for what I need.
So I will venture on. I don’t venture alone. I venture of course with my lovely and family and with the embrace and in the arms of a compassionate and patient congregation, to which I am eternally grateful.
For the last half of the summer up to the autumn equinox I will be preaching on some interesting texts that are not in the canonical New Testament but are nevertheless ancient Christian texts that were revered as scripture by some people at least.
I structure worship by using the four paths as outlined by Matthew Fox in his work Original Blessing. The path that corresponds with summer is the via positiva or the way of awe and wonder. As summer in the northern hemisphere is filled color and sound and nature showing off her abundance, so the spiritual path of awe and wonder is abundant. The way or the path is to name the sacred with as many names as the universe can contain. Life is a feast, a celebration, dancing and singing all day and all night.
It is a season to welcome new voices to the party. I thought this would be a good season to introduce some of these interesting texts. These texts are from volume published just this year called A New New Testament: A Bible for the 21st Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts.
The editor of this volume is Hal Taussig who has been to our congregation twice for Jesus Seminars on the Road. His time with us was spent introducing us to some of these texts and talking about early Christian worship and life. Hal teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and pastors Chestnut Hill Methodist Church, a progressive community in Philadelphia.
I interviewed him on Religion ForLife a couple of months ago about this book. This is what he said about why he put this together. He said that he had been introducing people around the country to these ancient texts for 15 to 20 years. These texts were contemporary with texts that are in the New Testament but were not known, in fact many hadn’t been discovered until 1945 at Nag Hammadi, but even those that had been available, still even those most people didn’t know existed.
As he was introducing some of these texts people were saying to him, “Why aren’t these in the Bible? I want these.” Hal said it took a while, 15 years or so for him to get the message that people were looking for a new New Testament. They wanted a Bible that included other texts for the purpose of their own spiritual engagement. Not just for academic interest, but for interests of the heart so to speak.
Hal said that people told him that they found long lost sisters in some of these texts. That isn’t to say that these newly discovered texts contain all the great secrets and all the good stuff that the "bad church" hid away and instead kept for us just the boring and controlling ones.
No, some of the texts that didn’t make the Bible are simply not very good. Some of the books that made the Bible aren’t very good either. I could do without Jude for instance, which is little more than a paranoid diatribe against enemies. It isn’t a matter of books that made the bible are holy and good and those that didn’t are profane and heretical. or vice versa.
Let the singers sing of the kindness of the Lord Most High,
Let them bring their psalms.Let their hearts be as the day,
And their chants as the great beauty of the Lord.
Let there be no one that is without knowledge,
And who is without voice.
What a wonderful affirmation! How long have so many been without voice? How long have our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters have had to live in secret with “a love that dare not speak its name.” Only recently with thanks to the courage of whole-hearted people have so many begun to share their voices. Because of that all of us benefit from a chant that is “as the great beauty of the Lord.”
Here is a radiant text that gives voice to the experience of finding one’s voice and the great joy of adding that voice to the human and divine chorus. The lovely irony is that this text itself, these Odes of Solomon, are voices of early Christian sisters and brothers who have been mute for two thousand years.
The Odes of Solomon have an interesting history. They were found in a pile on a scholars’ desk in the early 20th century. They are about a third of the size of the Book of Psalms. They were not written by Solomon, but a wide variety of authors in the 1st or 2nd century. They are hymns to Christ, sometimes they are the voice of Christ. Sometimes human and divine voices are mixed. They are lush and rich poetry, at times mixing feminine and masculine imagery. For example this is Christ speaking:
Love me with gentleness, those who love.
For I do not turn my face from my own,
Because I recognize them.
Even from before, when they did not yet exist,
I knew them,
And I imprinted a seal on their faces.
I fashioned their members,
And I presented my own breasts for them,
So they could drink my own consecrated milk, that through it they might live.
That is different. Possibilities for communion arise. Rather than drinking Christ’s blood from death, here is Christ’s milk from life. Mystics of course have often engaged in this gender-bending, imagining Christ in their poetry as mother or sister. Medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich comes to mind. But here is that lush imagery in an ancient Christian text. The Odes of Solomon do not replace the canonical New Testament, but they add a voice to its chorus.
For the next six weeks I will speak on more of these texts such as The Gospel of Mary, The Thunder Perfect Mind, the Gospel of Truth, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, and others. I meant to start last week with the Gospel of Thomas, but was home sick. The Gospel of Thomas is so important, I am going to devote a season to that book beginning in the Fall. Of course, we are excited to welcome two scholars for a Jesus Seminar on the Road in October to spend a weekend with us discussing the Gospel of Thomas.
Again, these are early Christian voices that helped shape the spiritual life and practice of those early Christians who embraced these texts. How the book A New New Testament came to be is that Hal called together a council of scholars and spiritual leaders, a couple of them are even Presbyterian, and asked them to vote and select ten texts from 60 or so of the best literature of that period in the 1st and 2nd centuries contemporary with the writings of the canonical New Testament. If you purchase A New New Testament, you will find these works not in an appendix but alongside and interspersed among the traditional texts. They all have nice introductions as well as history of how the original canon was formed and a study guide.
This sermon is really an introduction to A New New Testament and my sermon series, as well as an introduction to The Odes of Solomon. I do feel I need to preach. Take a moment and let’s look at this text, 7:22-8:7. This is via positiva. Hear the imagery:
Sing, bring psalms, chant, demonstrate kindness, acknowledge strength, open your hearts to the dancing joy of the Lord….
Hear the rhythm as I read this:
Let the singers sing of the kindness of the Lord Most High,
Let them bring their psalms.
Let their hearts be as the day,
And their chants as the great beauty of the Lord.
Let there be no one that is without knowledge,
And who is without voice.
For he gave a mouth to creation,
To open the voice of the mouth toward him
And praise him.
Acknowledge his strength,
Demonstrate his kindness.
Open; open your hearts to the dancing joy of the Lord
And let your love abound from heart to lips:
In order to bring forth fruits for the Lord, a holy life,
And to speak with attention in his light.
Stand and be restored,
All of you who were once flattened.
Speak, you who were silent,
Because your mouth has been opened.
From now on be lifted up, you who were destroyed
Since your justice has been raised.
For the Right Hand of the Lord is with you all,
And she will be a helper for you.
Peace was prepared for you,
Before what may be your war.
What about that last line? I am reading along and it is happy and we are finding our voices and justice has been raised and all is good, and peace has been prepared and then, boom,
Before what may be your war.
This is no light and fluffy text. We think of war and then peace. Instead, this is peace, then war. This peace is the peace of confidence, the peace that provides the strength to engage what may come. This peace comes before your war and sustains you through it. This peace, confidence, and strength demonstrate itself in kindness, joy and love, comes through the act of worship, of singing, of chanting, and dancing. You stand at attention in the light of the Lord because your voice matters.
You have found your voice. But that doesn’t mean everyone wants to hear it. There will be resistance. But the resistance will not overwhelm you because you have the strength of voice. Your mouth has been opened.
The text is wise in that it doesn’t elaborate what the war is or who the enemy is. In fact, it may not be an external enemy. The war may be an internal struggle. It may be a struggle with fear, grief, anger, hopelessness. Those won’t necessarily go away because you have found your voice. No, it is your voice that has been opened for you, a voice that speaks truth, kindness, justice, and love that will speak amidst all of those other things and allow you to walk through them with courage and hope.
The text tells me that whatever may be my war or your war, there is no need for fear or despair. The song continues. Your mouth has already been opened. It is a powerful passage that reminds me that even though I may not feel strong enough, my ego may not be powerful enough, there is yet a strength larger and more powerful that is with me, and with you.
So also the spirit of the Lord speaks through my members,
And I speak through his love.
Amen.
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