Robert Kolb (PhD, University of Wisconsin) is mission professor of systematic theology emeritus at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles.
Heading for the stadium, I heard the band start up the school song, and long before I got to the gate, I was humming along. Late for church, the moment I opened the door to the narthex and heard the familiar hymn, I started singing along, even before I reached my pew. The melody erased my regrets about being late and concentrated my thoughts on the game, on the worship. Melodies float through the wind and grab hold of us, sometimes when we least expect to be able to sing. Voices lifted in praise whisper from around the throne of the Lamb, singing their joy and delight into the drab and dejection of the daily grind, catching us unawares with their everlasting song.
Plodding or rushing through life, sometimes mourning, sometimes broken, sometimes dwelling on some sin, we suddenly notice a voice that cuts through the commotion to remind us that we are in conversation with our Lord Jesus himself.
When it hurts, when my patience wears thin, when no one is around, he sings me a love song. His tunes pierce through the static and the racket, the clamor of confusion. They summon us to take his path through the chaos and bedlam of life. The echoes of the choirs gathered around the throne of the Lamb slice through the conflicting voices of our every day and call us to head in his direction. Drifting in from the other side, the divine descants invite us to pick up the beat already in the midst of today’s dreariness and disillusion.
We often have plenty of reasons not to sing. Mourning over lost friendships and departed friends chokes us up. The brokenness of shattered hopes and dreams can stop the notes in our throats. Sins make us too embarrassed to try to sing. And then he says, “I have chosen you.” The body aches, and the spirit is sore, and songs just do not come. Anticipation of the dreadful takes away our breath, and no notes emerge. Besides that, singing alone I’d rather not. As we cruise down the boulevard, we suddenly discover that it is a dead end street. Then the music that takes wing from the people of God invites us to detour in the direction of the throne of the great and living God.
The people of Israel sang what we call “psalms of ascent” as they went up to Jerusalem. In German they are called “songs of the pilgrimage,” songs sung on the road, while God’s people were on their way to special festivals that brought fellow believers from all over the land together in Jerusalem. The psalms of ascent in the Bible include the fifteen psalms numbered 120 to 134. They include cries for God’s help and his presence, expressions of thanks and praise, and celebrations of the unity and fellowship the pilgrims experienced as they joined with those from other villages and towns in moving toward the temple. They came with concerns and burdens from back home, but they sang them into the hands of their Lord as they moved in the company of others who shared their faith in the God of Israel.
Today we experience the same power of songs of praise that acknowledge the wonders of the love of our God. The Holy Spirit brings us together as his people to plant in our own thinking the confidence in what God is doing for us as we have seen his love go to the cross and come out of the empty tomb for us. With his sacrifice and his triumph in mind, we easily are drawn into the choir of stragglers moving through life who have caught the tune.
For we have come to realize that the Holy Spirit is a choirmaster extraordinaire. He floats the chorus of Calvary through an empty tomb and into our hearing. He whispers a line from a favorite hymn and begins to build toward a crescendo of angelic descants. He lifts his baton, and we are drawn into singing along, falteringly and fitfully at first and then with ever more vigor and vitality, with a choir from every tongue and land.
Some of us move more slowly, dragging ourselves through one slough of despond after another, but the beat picks us up. We make haste to come to the King, the great and living God, to sing out our joy that flows from the peace of knowing Jesus as our Lord and Deliverer. For he has overcome. He has sung the first line of our battle hymn that takes form in squealing our joy as the children of God. He has sung in the face of evils of every kind, in the face of the Evil One himself, with his song of victory that announced his triumph as he left death dead and our sins behind when he came out of his tomb.
This Easter joy that springs from the Son’s overcoming everything that would take our life’s breath away bubbles out of our hearts through our mouths into the lives of our fellow pilgrims ascending to the throne. Our joyful song spills over into the world of darkness and deafness to the Word of the Lord that surrounds us in our everyday lives. The joy of our singing strikes those around us who have only sour melodies in their lives to wonder how they might leave the dirges of a life surrounded by death—no matter how lively or lascivious the dirges might be—and find new life in the songs of Christ’s people.
For they, we, are heading toward the throne, where Almighty God has prepared a feast for his family. He has invited the world, and he wants us to sing the invitation to those around us who are still on dead end streets with their hurts, their loneliness, their brokenness and sinfulness. He wants the world to know that mourning and waiting need no longer be. For his song of triumph over Satan and sin, over all the assaults that try to drag us into darkness and death, is designed to welcome people into his eternal banquet hall.