The Old South Church in Boston
The Hymns, Psalms and Spiritual Songs of Isaac Watts
Sermon by James W. Crawford
II Corinthians 9: 6-13
Mark 10: 17-22*October27 , 2003
INTRODUCTION
How can I tell you how wonderful we feel to be back among you this morning. The pancake breakfast, as usual, was a smash. Linda and I, Rob and Henry cherish you and live by our memories of, hopes for, and continued ties to this splendid congregation. My thanks to your officers, to you, and to Carl Schultz for including us this morning.
I will offer some further remarks later in our service. in the meantime, let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditation and hymns of our hearts be acceptable to you, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
"The Hymns, Psalms and Spiritual Songs of Isaac Watts"
"Young Man! Give us something better!"
I hold in my hand one of the treasures of the Christian Church. It's a compilation of metrical Psalms to be sung by a congregation with an appendix of hymns printed in 1769. This book is the product of two Irishmen, Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady and known simply as "Tate and Brady." You gave me this Psalm book on the occasion of my retiring in June, 2002. It contains the Hymns sung in the Anglican and Congregational churches of the 17th and 18th centuries. It holds the Psalms paraphrased, metered, designed as poetic couplets, each line sung by a cantor, the congregation repeating the line. In our Reformed tradition emerging from John Calvin's Geneva in the mid- to-late 16th century, the only music in Puritan churches of that century -- including this church -- the only music came from the human voice reciting in musical form the doggerel, the awkwardly structured, the often miserably unmusical, garbled paraphrases of the Psalms. And in this lyric fashion, those metrical Psalms adhered as closely as possible to the original Hebrew. For our Congregational forebears nothing counted but singing the scriptures -- and only the Psalms offered the perfect fit.
But one 15-year-old polymath named Isaac Watts, living in 1689 in Southampton, England concluded after singing Sunday after Sunday out of Tate and Brady's predecessor known as "Sternhold and Hopkins" -- he concluded this incessant Psalm singing to be: tedious, dreary, lifeless, boring. As he later put it, "The singing of God's praise is the part of worship nighest heaven, and its performance among us is the worst on earth." Thus, on one Sunday, following a particularly excruciating service, tired of his son's railing against the pathetic music at home, the boy's father in frustration challenged him, "Young man! Give us something better." That very afternoon Isaac Watts composed a new hymn based on the imagery of Revelation; his congregation sang it that night. Goodbye "Sternhold and Hopkins." Adios, "Tate and Brady." Hello, Isaac Watts! A revolution began.
And what a revolution Isaac Watts inaugurated! To be sure, he certainly failed to look or act like a revolutionary. Throughout his life Watts suffered from chronic illness, spending many of his mature years in bed with a variety of fevers and infirmities. One of his biographers infers, hypochondria. From the very beginning he was smaller than usual. Someone described his as a "midget;" born a "brain with an excuse for a body." For all his brilliance he appeared most unattractive. We learn, for instance, of a beautiful and accomplished young woman who fell in love with Watts through his poetry -- never having seen him. Upon meeting, she stood shocked by his diminutive size and torpid demeanor. Naturally, he thought her terrific, fell deeply in love with her and proposed marriage. She replied with a "Thanks but no thanks" and added a disparaging denouement to the whole affair: "Mr. Watts," she wrote, "I only wish I could say that I admire the casket as much as I admire the jewel."
Not only do we find Watts suffering from chronic illness, we find him overflowing with a chronic compunction to versify. His conversation and table talk spilled out in incessant verse and ceaseless rhyming. On one occasion during family prayers -- a discipline practiced assiduously in the Watts household -- little Isaac began to giggle. His siblings and parents knelt aghast amid this impious behavior, and when the devotions closed his father, in chilling tones, asked why the profane outburst during morning prayers. The boy pointed to a bell-rope hanging near the fireplace and confessed to his father, "I saw a mouse running up that rope and the thought came to my mind,
There was a mouse for want of stairs,
Ran up the rope to say his prayers."Isaac's father, even then, so frustrated and infuriated by Isaac's relentlessly metered speech, he yanked a rod from a nearby shelf, whereupon, as one commentator observes, "the rhymster cried out through his tears,
"O father please, do some pity take,
And I will no more verses make."But no less important than his personal and family life, we need remember Isaac Watts grew up in a world where religious conflict divided families and nations. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 with the removal of the Roman Catholic King, James II, and the ascension of the William and Mary turned a Protestant tide in England. Even then, Catholics and Protestants went at one another's throats. Indeed, Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Congregationalists all claimed to represent ultimate Christian truth in partisan struggles engaging almost everyone. The Anglicans, at the time were in charge with their king, their queen, their bishops. The Roman Catholics devised plots to recapture the days of the Roman Catholic Stuarts, Charles I, Charles II, and James II. Throughout this volatile period of English religious wars, the Watts family stood with the dissenters, the independents, the Congregationalists, the Free Church people. Isaac's father went to jail twice for resisting Prince and Prelate. The story goes his mother sat on the doorstep and nursed the youthful Isaac while conversing with her husband through prison bars.
This mood of dissent carried over to Watts and his Psalms and Hymns. Here the revolution explodes. A new hymnal among Protestant types always triggers bitter controversy. We in this congregation know that. What did Isaac Watts do? He recast the Psalms into the vernacular. Yet, he added an aesthetic dimension, transcending the unwieldy wooden and literal texts of the likes of "Tate and Brady."
But more, Isaac Watts transformed the Psalms into Christian songs of praise. In answer to his father's taunt that he give us something better, Isaac Watts wrote hymns, says one biographer, "which were no mere re-shuffling of a rigid pattern of Scriptural phases, but songs of praise to Christ." As your bulletin infers, Watts "Christianized" the Psalms. Watts described his religious and aesthetic vision of the Psalms as follows: "David left a rich variety of holy songs, but rich as it is, it is still far short of the glorious things we Christians have to sing before the Lord."
"To my judgment," continues one commentator, "the royal author (David) is more honored when he is most intelligible, and when his admirable compositions are copied in such language as give light and joy to saints that live two thousand years after him."
Isaac Watts wants us to honor God and Christ through our singing of the Psalms of David.
And not only Psalms, but hymns? Here, another quantum leap. Isaac Watts composed texts no longer rooted even in the Psalms. He took flight. he forged texts from allusions to scripture, he versified the tenets of the Reformed faith, he elegized the stirrings of his own heart. He pointed to the majesty of God; the healing, saving, restoring activity of Jesus Christ, the grace and peace mediated through the Spirit. He fashioned the impact of the Christian story and its implications for our hearts and minds. He wants our singing to express an intimate friendship with the one to whom we offer our praise. As Watts himself expressed it, "How unspeakable is the pleasure of holding converse with so infinite, so almighty and so compassionate a friend." Indeed!
"Young man!" admonished his father. "Give us something better."
And so we begin this morning with that what he thought to be something better. It's Psalm 72 with an Isaac Watts text. The Psalmist himself yearns for a king who will bring international respect and social well-being throughout the whole world.
In the poetry of our hymn this morning, Isaac Watts illustrates a ruler the Psalmist could not name, but whom evangelical Isaac Watts knew well. Watts' universal ruler, of course, is Jesus Christ, and in what is known as the "Greatest Missionary Hymn ever written" we express our hope, as we encounter the dangers, risks, the injury and conflict of our world. Indeed, we express our anticipation for a new sovereignty among us -- a new justice -- and we sing our confidence, "Jesus shall reign whe'ere the sun.. ."
Have Christians Anything to Boast About?
We will sing in a moment what many people believe to be the finest English hymn ever written, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." This hymn represents the revolutionary change Watts brought to English hymnody. He launched texts reflective of his own devotional and homiletical thinking. This happens to be the first English hymn to use the personal pronoun, "I," and as a footnote, Lowell Mason who composed the tune, "Hamburg," served for years as director of Boston's Handel and Haydn Society. The text of this marvelous hymn arises from Isaac Watts' meditation on Paul's prayerful assertion to the Church in Galatia: "May I never boast of anything except the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world."
What goes on here? What does Watts see in this Biblical gem? Well, Isaac Watts realizes at Paul's confession, that we can do nothing religiously to deserve the love of God. We can boast of perfect church attendance, we can fashion a spiritual discipline of prayer and devotion; we can make a terrific pledge to the church or invest ourselves deeply in works of charity and justice. All of these virtues are valuable, to be sure. But finally, we live as an act of gratitude for what love has done for us at great cost and thus, what else can we do, as Watts himself observes, but offer "our soul, our life, our all."
Out of the Depths
The title of this little section of the service is simply, "An Interlude of Prose;" the theme: "Out of the depths."
Isaac Watts suffered from chronic debilitating illnesses. He found himself frequently abed, seriously stricken, contemplating the worst. The hymn we are abut to sing probably emerges from his sick bed. Our hymn consists of the first two verses of Psalm 116, the whole text itself running six verses, taking the Psalmist and thus Watts to death's door, anticipating the worst, yet closing with consolation and relief. As Watts writes,
My God hath saved my soul from death,
And dried my falling tears;
Now to his praise I'll spend my breath,
And my remaining years.The tune is an anonymous Gospel melody. Richard Smallwood arranged it. Smallwood is a Howard University graduate, who founded Howard's first Gospel choir, "The Celestials," which, as frequently happens, found itself banned from the campus, and then, of course, ended up radically changing Howard's music curriculum. Richard Smallwood currently leads ensembles all over the world, performing his Gospel music amid welcoming church congregations everywhere. "People need to know Someone can heal their hurts," Smallwood writes, "I take no credit for the work we do. I owe it all to God and I feel blessed that for some reason God has chosen me to make a difference in people's lives.
So, out of the depths of sickness the Psalmist and Isaac Watts composed their poems but both perceived restoration and health and closed their texts on a high note of gratitude, as "Tate and Brady" put it:
Therefore my life's remaining years,
which Go to me shall lend,
Will I in praises to his Name
and in his Service, spend.
The "Hymn of Deliverance" for the Protestant "Passover."
To most of us August 1 brings just another summer day. But for over a century, following August 1, 1714, for English religious dissenters, for the Congregationalists of Great Britain, August 1 heralded a new exodus, a new freedom, a ringing religious liberty. You see, on that day the last of the Stuarts, Protestant-resistant Queen Anne died. Her death nullified a so-called "Schism Bill" aimed at the likes of Isaac Watts and his dissenting allies. There was in that Schism Bill legislation memories of "Bloody Queen Mary," that monarch most eager to terminate Protestants, and annihilate Presbyterians, and Congregationalists of the Watts species. As one Watts biographer writes, the Schism Bill surfaced recollection of a time "when the thumbscrew, the rack and other holy ordinances were religiously administered," and "the burning of a martyr was a popular entertainment." Dissenters of the Watts stripe were once more to be "fined, pilloried, dungeoned, exiled, done to death. Bloody events impended. A frightful storm seemed to be gathering." Queen Anne's death saved the dissenters from the burning stake on the very day the schism bill was to take effect. Her death caused a celebration among Dissenters driving them to rally in the streets and to celebrate her demise. The imposition of legalized religious intolerance dissipated. For half a century, at least, August 1 became as one observer writes, a "Protestant Passover."
And for Isaac Watts? What else? He composed a hymn. He brooded over the first five verses of Psalm 90 and out of his contemplation and euphoria he composed the text of a new majestic hymn. he called it "Man's Frailty and God's Eternity." He wrote a nine verse hymn, much of it devoted to the fragility, the transcience, the evanescence of human existence resting on the rock of the Divine's promised presence. He proclaimed a sure future for our lives as eras come and go, rise and fall, as human beings live and die, and the tides of history ebb and flow. Trust undergirds this hymn; trust in a God who cares for us, bears with us, sustains us through every personal crisis and historical catastrophe, indeed. One whose love will never let us go. Tate and Brady capture it this way:
O Lord the Savior and Defense
of us Thy chosen race
From age to age thou still hast been
our sure abiding place.Now that's true liberation. We sing a freedom song!
In Response to Receiving Title of "Minister Emeritus"
Whenever I encounter Russ I am pleased for your sake that over these months you have possessed such devoted and consecrated leadership. With Dwight Crane chairing your board of Trustees and Ely Pierce as your Senior Deacon, you have here a leadership triumvirate second to none. Congratulations!
As I suggested earlier in the service, Lind and I cherish our years here at Old South. Your welcome on this occasion and the honor just bestowed touches us deeply and we offer you, the officers of the congregation and Carl Schultz our gratitude for initiating and making possible not only this service of worship, but what promises to be a scintillating as well as spiritually and intellectually stimulating lecture on Wednesday evening. What you have done humbles us and deeply moves us both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Just a sentimental note for a moment if you would. I regret my mother cannot be here today. She is recovering, at 93, from that bane of old age, a broken hip. But she thrives on being among church people and sharing her children's, grandchildren's and great-grand children's lives. I am pleased two of our four children, Henry and Rob, could be among us today.
On a not so sentimental note, I wish my kindergarten teacher and grammar school principal were here today. They would be perplexed. Shocked. They knew I was headed, not for the Old South Church, but for Sing-Sing.
Now I see the church enters a little more intensely into its moment of transition. Lael Murphy leaves for Payson Park in some three weeks. Is Lael fantastic or what? No one could have had a finer, more competent, more simpatico and loyal partner in ministry than I had in Lael Murphy. Indeed, on her dossier I wrote for the sake of those who were seeking a new minister -- I wrote as follows: "If the opportunity arises for your church to invite Lael Murphy as your pastor: grab her!" And in fleshing that out, among many other things I wrote, "You will be privileged to count as your pastor a woman of myriad gifts, capable of exponential tasks, fabulously well organized and supremely able to administer her dreams. [Sounds like Lael, doesn't i?] And I closed this way, "In Lael Murphy, you've a terrific candidate on your hands. interview her. Call her. Celebrate your decision. Then thank the Providence of God she came your way." Well, Lael, there's no one here, especially me, who doesn't thank the Providence of God you came our way!
And Greg Peterson! What a splendid church musician! What a fabulous colleague! What an ultimate professional. What a reverent partner in preparation and collaboration in worship. As Linda and I stumble out there in our wilderness exile searching for churches to worship in, nothing can touch the quality of the singing, the breadth of the repertoire, the appropriate musical choice for the occasion -- and friends, what we call the noodling, "walking around music" that accompanies the choreography of the service -- few, if any, can match Greg in these capacities. I envy you every Sunday as11:00 a.m. approaches, and am grateful for the years he and I shared here -- and indeed, for the opportunity to take another sot at it this morning. Thanks a lot choir! Thank you, Greg!
My kinds have asked me if this new status, "Minister Emeritus" comes with any perks? Like, for instance, Parking? I tell them I've lost the dark circles under my eyes. There are no more evening meetings. They say, "How abut parking privileges?" I tell you I'm just pleased Evan Shu included me as a member of your staff on the internet and deeply appreciate your including me alongside the likes of Jennifer, Elisa, Helen and Dave and this wonderful administrative, program and pastoral staff.
Three quick things before we continue. First, your interim Minister. Are you lucky? Can you believe it? No tyrant, he. No meddler. No pretentious cleric. He's a leader with a light hand and a gentle style. he has tendered me every kindness. His generosity and, along with that of your officers and your agreement, made this day possible. Carl's job: to help steer this good ship from the port of September 2002 to the port of "whenever" -- and to be in the wheelhouse when the boat gets there. You've got a great captain in Carl Schultz, one whose experience and distinctive native down-east accent proves he can navigate the shoals of New England congregations with alacrity and candor, patience and faith, and who, with his ebullient and upbeat Della, helps to make this church secure and headed to safe harbor.
Secondly: As I look at what is tearing the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists and Catholics apart, even as we worship this morning, I come here, and read again our church's bulletin note, "On the inclusive Dimensions of God's Grace," and am consoled. you are a beacon, even among UCC churches, as you seek to make evident among yourselves God's "new creation." What a splendid ministry.
And lastly, if you will indulge me for just another moment: a theological reflection on events just last night brought to an abrupt close.
A Padres fan, a Cubs fan and a Red Sox fan joined one another at the mourners' bench while the New York Yankees and the Florida Marlins played the World Series.
The Padres' fan with pleading voice, tears streaming down his cheeks, calls on the Divine: "O Lord God," he pleads, "Will the San Diego Padres ever win the World Series?" And from on high there comes a basso profundo, sepulchral voice, echoing through the heavens: "Indeed my son, the San Diego Padres shall win the World Series. And they shall win it in your life time."
The Cubs' fan, in anguish, tears splattering his cheeks, cries to the Divine, "O Lord God, in your Providence will the Chicago Cubs ever win the World Series?" And from on high, a basso profundo, sepulchral voice echoing throughout the universe, responds, "Indeed, my daughter, the Chicago Cubs will win the World Series. But not in your lifetime."
And the Red Sox fan, anguished tears flowing down his cheeks, in pleading voice cries, "Lord God, in your Providence, will the Boston Red Sox ever win the World Series?" And again, from on high, a voice, basso profundo, sepulchral, echoing through the firmament, "Indeed, my son, the Boston Red Sox will win the World Series. But not in my life time."
Let all who are able stand and join in this great Isaac Watts hymn of ministry and mission, "Come We Who Love God's Name." Marching to Zion - hymn 382..
The Old South Church in Boston
645 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 536-1970