Beeson podcast, Episode 396 Amy Schifrin June 12, 2018 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. We're going to hear a lecture today that was given during our Finkenwalde Day 2017 by Dr. Amy Schifrin. Amy Schifrin is the president of the North American Lutheran Seminary. She's a Lutheran liturgist, a expert in homiletics. Her research interests include hymnody, liturgical music. She's a wonderful scholar and leader in the Lord's church. You're going to hear a little bit about her life and background in this sermon. She was brought up in a Jewish family. She talks about her baptism as a Christian in the name of the Holy Trinity. She talks about her experience as a pastor on the Canadian plains in, I think it was Saskatchewan. You're going to hear an interesting background that she brings to her work in giving a lecture on Singing the Reformation. I'll give you a little warning about this lecture you're going to hear. It's not your typical lecture. First of all, there's nothing boring about it. It's too bad that lectures are sometimes boring, but Amy Schifrin doesn't know how to give boring lectures and this is not one. This is a lecture that has a practical dimension to it. It's called Singing the Reformation, and she both speaks and sings her lecture on Singing the Reformation. You're going to like this. Let me say something else. Don't quit before it ends. There is a special story at the end of this lecture you will not want to miss. Let's go to Hodges Chapel here at Beeson Divinity School and hear our friend, Dr. Amy Schifrin on Singing the Reformation. Amy Schifrin: It is wonderful to be here with you today. This is my first visit to your lovely campus, and I want to say a special thank you to Dean George for inviting me. I also want to bring you greetings from the North American Lutheran Seminary and the whole community at Trinity School For Ministry. We are Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and a host of Christians together. Everyone from Free Church to Mennonites now on the campus together studying, and it is a sight to behold. We give thanks to God. I bring you greetings from that community because we are one in Christ together. I also want you to know I had a really hard time getting dressed today. When people tell me to give a lecture and then go on a bird walk, it's kind of hard to find something in the middle, so I hope I haven't offended anybody's sartorial expressions here. The title of my lecture today is Singing the Reformation: The Sound of Holiness. We know a sound when we hear it. We know a sound when we hear it. We can tell the difference between a toddler's giggle and a teenager's cry of despair. Between an angry husband's “rumpf” as he slams the door and his sigh of relief when his wife welcomes him back into her arms. Between a baby's first piercing wail having made that long journey through the birth canal and a raspy rattle of the dying just before life on this earth ceases. We know a sound when we hear it. We know a sound when we hear it. I learned to pray as a child through sound. Non-discursive sound more than language. Syllables were sung, chanted, and occasionally spoken, but they had little cognitive meaning to me. Someone put a prayer book in my hand before I could read in any language and indicated that I should look from right to left. I had no idea what the words were. I had a scarf on my head and patent leather shoes on my feet, and my body learned to move with the sound of the congregation. Sometimes my eyes would just close and I would feel my breath as it connected me to the breath of those around me. Eventually, I learned to recognize some of the words. They were chanted over and over at every service, and although people seemed to be praying words at their own pace when it came to these words their sounded prayer joined them as one. (singing) Hear, oh, Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is one. It was the sound of holiness, and the sound was holy. I learned to pray as a child through sound, through sight, through gesture, through the actions of a faithful community. I never learned to read Hebrew as a child because I was a girl and my family didn't think that was an important thing for girls to do. They didn't realize that I had already learned the language of faith by sound and that I could recognize it anywhere. It was as clear as a ram's horn and as mysterious as the swish of cloth from 1,000 tallis in the wind. On the festival of Simchat Torah, the sacred scroll was carried into the assembly with the joy that one would have in bringing a newborn into the room to be seen by a great-grandma. The word of the Lord was in our midst and we sang, and we sang, and we sang some more. I remember at four years of age standing on a chair kissing my father's tallis and reaching out as far as I could to touch the word of God as it danced by, holiness in motion. We know a sound when we hear it. 25 years later, almost a decade after I had been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, water splashing, arms embracing, tears flowing, hearing God's word, I visited Grace Episcopal Cathedral on a trip to San Francisco. We were all standing at our pews and the choir entered. It was Palm Sunday, and robed in the finest purple, the choir was following a processional cross, a jeweled cross now wrapped in a burlap sack. 75 men and boys moving as one. They started near the front and then circled around and up in the inside of the cathedral. Somewhere in the back, out of sight, a group of children, little boys and girls from every tribe and nation entered the procession, and as they came up the center aisle waving their palm branches we sang. (singing) I thought I should kiss a tallis and reach out, for the Lord, the holy one of Israel was riding by. We know a sound when we hear it. A few years later I was called to serve my first parish as a pastor. It was on the Saskatchewan prairie, 200 miles north of the Montana line. Quite a ways from here. There were three tiny churches filled with Swedes, Norwegians, Germans from Russia, and a few Danes, both happy and sad. All heirs of the Reformation. I had an 80-mile roundtrip on Sunday morning to these isolated communities that survive the winds of winter and the clouds of hoppers, grasshoppers, locusts, bad things, in the summer. Each church had its own ethnic and familial traditions, as well as a few culinary ones. From lutefisk, to sandbakkles, to, "Pastor, have a schnapps before dinner." Each church had its own unique identity within the body of Christ. These were farmers and potash miners, store clerks and grain elevator operators. A few babies were born every year, but with the aging population and the harsh conditions far more people died. When I say harsh conditions, some days it only got up to 40 below. A woman named Astrid Soderbergh sang at every funeral in one of those little churches. Astrid was a World War II bride from Denmark who knew little English before her arrival in Canada, but she had a gorgeous soprano voice in any and every language. Den Store Hvide Flok Vi Se, a 17th-century Norwegian folk tune with text from the Danish bishop Hans Brorson. (singing) She sang. We wept. Holy, holy, holy. No matter what scripture was spoken, no matter what I preached, she sang and we wept. We know a sound when we hear it. I learned from her and from that tiny community of faith about the depth and power of the performed connections between preaching and hymnody that break open the biblical word and bind our lives together in an eternal embrace. For when All Saints Sunday rolled around that year and the lectionary sent us to the book of Revelation, I preached and the assembly sang the de tempore hymn, the hymn of the day that I had chosen. They had never sung it before as an assembly. They had only heard it from Astrid, so I gave the first and third, which was the last verse to the congregation and the second verse to Astrid to sing as a solo while we read the names of those who had entered the church triumphant the past year. (singing) The voices of the holy ones mingled with ours and as surely as the great Shema framed all that had occurred in the synagogue, the storefront shul of my childhood, so now we heard the saints and angels calling us to live in the merciful love of the holy one who has no end. We are sung into this life in assembly, after assembly, where the word is spoken, the water is poured, and the bread and wine shared both in sorrow and in quiet ecstasy. In singing, in this sacred context, the sacred frame that is the beloved community gathered in the triune name sound becomes part of that vast connective tissue that binds our lives to the saints, the holy ones of every age. What is it about a hymn or a spiritual song that gives it the power to evoke an instinctive truly primal response? What is it about a hymn or song that can release our tears in a way that mere speech cannot? What is it that can bring new confidence to the depressed and a peace-filled hope to the grieving? What is it that enlivens the music so as to bring a courage to the downtrodden that is greater than any fear, mightier than any tyrant? What is it about a hymn or song that stays with us through the dark night and into the next day and will not let our hearts go? What is it about a song that lays claim to us so deeply that it sings us into life again and again and yet again? More than most things in this life, that which is given to us through the human voice has the power to cut through all the façades that we use to protect ourselves and to reach the buried places deep in our weary hearts. For it is in these places, these bone-deep places, that we learn at last the truth about how deeply God loves us and how we have no life apart from him, nor apart from each other. In singing, we come to know why God gave humankind a voice. In singing praise to the most high and holy God, we are surprised, overwhelmed, and sometimes even overcome to find his voice sounding in ours, his love beating in our very bodies. The church, with its ritual roots, and the Psalter of synagogue and temple was born in the voice of song. And through most of ecclesial history, and for this we owe a debt of gratitude to some of the reformers, the church has intuited the need to be joined in that auditory, miraculous realm, wherein we trust in the God whom we cannot see. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. We know a sound when we hear it. God gifts us with this miraculous world of sound so that we might know how much he loves us. God gifts us with this world of sound so that we might sing the glory of his love. God gifts us with this miraculous world of sound so that in the assembly gathered in his name we might hear beyond what we can see and be led into the future he has prepared for us. When our voices sound a bitter word against a neighbor, or come out shaped like a dagger as a curse against an enemy, or mock in a snicker that is the residue of gossip, the misuse of the miracle of sound is revealed. But a hymn sung in Christ, with Christ, and through Christ, where the beauty of words are shaped and discovered in the lyric line of an ascending melody or in a harmony that pulses and drives to its resolution like waves against the sand, then our speech, our language is transformed into what it should be, the glorious praise of God. In hymns that span the centuries, as they span the ranges of the human voice, we sing the victors song, announcing his lordship even in the midst of all that threatens to tear life from us. For the praise of God, like God himself, is eternal, and as we sing together the voices of those who have gone before us sound in ours, granting us strength to sing the next generation into life. His voice sounding in ours is where our fear dies and where trust begins. Our hymns sing to God our confession of faith. I love seeing The Apostles Creed up there, but I'm glad I have it memorized because I really can't see the words. But it's nice to know it's there. Our hymns sing to God our confession of faith. Our hymns sing to God so that all the world may hear his voice. The reformation laid out a path by which the texts, the words themselves in every vernacular could tell the sweep of salvation history in the context of a Trinitarian doxology, for the liturgy is simply the witness to the Bible given to us in doxological form. The music ... Well, the music opens to us that of which the text speaks, but not by more words, by something far more primal, the sound of creation itself. The melody of the spheres, the wind in the aspens, the whistle of the meadowlark, and the groaning of the whale. The crack of thunder and lightning on the prairie. The coyote's howl in the night. The banshee's scream. The hummingbird's hum. The vocalese of women and men and little children made in God's image, singing majesty, mystery, honor, power, grace, humility, thanksgiving, lament, and joy. This is the church's faith in living sound, for the human voice has been essential in creating the life together for which God has made us. I'll try not to spill water on the mic, whoever's in charge of that, by the way. I don't want to electrocute myself up here. Now, before we get to those important vernacular texts and see how they became integral to the shaping of the reformation witness within the church catholic, I want us to hear how these texts are wedded to melody and harmony, to sung breath and rhythm and pitch. I want you to join me in some vocalese of your own in using your voices without any words. I believe this is an essential step in understanding what it means to sing the faith, what it is to sound the holiness of God. We will get to Luther and say a word about Calvin and Zwingli as well. Do not worry. Luther actually approached music as sound itself. Sound that was regarded as important and critical in its own right, but for now, you have before you some hymns from a variety of ecclesial traditions throughout the last 500 years. Some of them you may know and some of them you will not know. Feel free to listen at first if any of them are new to you when we sing through one stanza of each one. If we have time, we can sing with words later. First, you can put your papers down for a second. Take a moment and think about that list. Majesty, mystery, honor, power, grace, humility, thanksgiving, and joy. Close your eyes if you like and go back in your memories to a place where you might have experienced one or another of them, or go forward and imagine what majesty, or grace, or joy might look like. Now let's hear what those gifts might sound like, and let us sing without words on an ah or an ooh, or percussive bump, bump, bump, when appropriate. I'm an alto, so I'm going to pitch it low, but if you can find a lower note, feel free to sing in harmony as well. Now, the first tune that I've chosen, you've already sung once this morning. That's how those things happen. This is a tune of majesty, and let us sing it together just on an ah. (singing) Now mystery. (singing) Honor. (singing) Thank you to the baritones who weren't shy. Power. (singing) Grace. (singing) For humility, we'll just sing the first half of the melody, the first few lines on this because the second page is not there. (singing) Thanksgiving. (singing) Lament came on a separate sheet. It is its own world. (singing) Joy, the day of resurrection. (singing) Each of these tunes has been paired with a text for congregational singing. We may know the words, and now you've had a chance just to sing the tunes, but in their mode of performance, as congregational song, text and tune lose their separate identities. Turn back with me to Rejoice, O Pilgrim Throng for a moment. Let's just speak the first verse of Rejoice, O Pilgrim Throng. Everybody got it? Rejoice, o pilgrim throng. Rejoice, give thanks, and sing. Your festal banner wave on high, the cross of Christ your king. Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice, give thanks, and sing. Now let's sing that first verse with the words. (singing) You really lose it when I sing the alto. Let us do that again, friends. (singing) Thank you. Otherwise, I could not make the point I'm going to make. Now not only is the text alive in our voices, but we who might have started out as strangers this morning have begun to grow together as we discover a common bond, a shared identity. We've come to know something about God, and we would learn even more if we sang all seven verses. We've come to know that we heirs of the Reformation are a pilgrim throng and that we have many, many things to rejoice about. A hymn, as text and tune united, may also gather associations for individuals. If you sang a particular hymn at your Aunt Tilly's funeral and then you sang it again during the season of Easter, or for congregations, if a particular hymn sung at a retirement of a beloved pastor is sung again at the retirement of another pastor. You may gather associations when you've lived far from home. It has even worked for the binding of ex-patriots to their homeland, as is the case with the hymn that we just sang, Rejoice, O Pilgrim Throng, which was sung at Trinity Episcopal Church in New York City on the 50th anniversary of the accession to the throne by Queen Victoria in 1897. In the words of musicologist Kenneth Hall, text and music interact with one another to produce meaning. The music, by creating a reading, not just a setting of the text, and the text by specifying a hearing of the music. Text and music each do this by providing a context within which the other is perceived and understood. Simply put, using texts allows human beings to vocalize. I would add to hull that hymns grow in meaning through their repetition in multiple liturgical and familial contexts. Just like a sung liturgy, hymns are at one and the same time discursive and non-discursive language. They are unlike the unison spoken responses of an assembly that can still be performed with a range of expressions from enthusiasm all the way to boredom, and they are unlike a purely instrumental musical offering that may have a title but is performed without spoken language. In a hymn, however, the tune and text read each other. Like both a spoken response and a musical offering, they also relate to all that is either spoken or sung surrounding them, but there are many layers. In ritual studies, we talk about thick meaning. Their many layers have the potential to enable the entire action of the liturgy to flow as in a single breath. There is a vast difference between understanding the relationship of tune and text as mutual reading than the more common manner of speaking in which we might say that a hymn text is given a musical setting. Setting implies that the meanings evoked by a hymn come solely from the text. Reading implies a true mutuality in which the language that has been spoken into your ears since you could hear your mother's voice in the womb and the non-discursive language with which God created the universe, the sound of the ocean against the sand, the crack of the earth as the boulders emerge, the fire whose roar is deafening, these come together in a miraculous audible way in the human voice giving praise and glory to God on high. If you turn back to your music packet to [foreign language 00:43:40], Lord Keep Us Steadfast in Your Word, this is a hymn that is paradigmatic of the Reformation era. It's one of Luther's catechetical hymns, believed to be also one of his own musical compositions, which it's interesting, is very, very loosely based on a 15th-century adaptation of the 12th-century plainsong [foreign language 00:44:07]. It was used in connection with the teaching of The Lord's Prayer, which like the sung psalter is itself a further performative doxological exegesis of the First Commandment from the mouth of Jesus, where he who sang the First Commandment in the form of the Shema teaches us to pray for what God has commanded so that we would receive what he has promised with thanksgiving. Lives of faithfulness, obedience, and praise. Luther's move to a vernacular catechetical doxological singing to the Western Rite gives the gathered assembly the commandment in sound, in a living sound that comes from our own bodies. We know a sound when we hear it, for that sound has claimed us as his own, claimed us for lives of holiness. Lord, Keep Us Steadfast In Your Word is a perfect model for congregational singing that lays the groundwork for what such singing will become in those next 500 years. Although it has undergone textual revision from specific threats to the word, it used to be murderous Pope and Turk, to more general ones ... You got that joke, right? It remains a multi-layered doxological expression that embeds Trinitarian structure, three verses for the three members of the Trinity, to a catechetical, theological reflection upon The Lord's Prayer. Jesus, who prayed the Psalter, and who, as proclaimed by the quartet of blessed evangelists quotes the Psalter 93 times, teaches his disciples to pray in this way, "Our father, who art in heaven." When sung hymnically within the mass by the Reformation assembly, this life of prayer within the covenant established by all mighty God is now used to set the framework through which the assembly will hear and receive the gospel. Let's sing, for now, the first verse of Lord, Keep Us Steadfast In Your Word, with its splendid and intuitive pairing of text and tune. Keep that in mind. (singing) Now, this may be a new hymn for some of you or a new translation for others, but for a few of you out there, just a few, my guess is that you know it better than your current address. In order to demonstrate how the text and music work in concert to open up the biblical word, I would like for us to sing this text of Luther's with some other tunes that share the same meter but whose musicological construction can lead to different results. With that text in mind, let's sing it to tune of Duke Street, which is the tune for I Know That My Redeemer Lives on the next page. It's (singing) But let's try it with these words. (singing) Different feel. Different parts of the text are emphasized. Let's try it with the tune for [inaudible 00:48:51] On Jordan's Banks the Baptist Cry. (singing) Just for fun, let's do it with The Bells of Christmas. (singing) I don't think you like that one so much. Let's try it with one more that might work. Deo Gracias, Oh, Love How Deep. (singing) We hear in these examples from the sublime to the absolutely ridiculous, how the congruency of text and tune was among the most central means by which the church's Reformation theology has been communicated. With hymnody, as with liturgy in general, in the words of my dear friend Gordie Lathrup, manner has everything to do with meaning. Manner, how we do something is really what we do. Manner has everything to do with meaning. The wedding of tune and text within a defined repertoire that is a hymnal creates an habituated knowing a sense of what is natural and right. This is how ritual works, through action, through sacred frame, through repetition. Heirs of the Reformation receives not only the habituated knowing of a particular hymn but also the habituated knowing that hymns are integral to the liturgy. They are not an addendum. The move to singing strophic hymns, and that is hymns with multiple verses, as brilliant as it was, was not always a part however, of ever reformation tradition. Even now there are a few denominational expressions that do not engage in it, but once it was experienced in Western Christendom it could not be stopped. With Luther, especially with his Deutsche Messe of 1526, his German mass, it just flourished. He used his hymn texts in a homiletic way, giving the people of singing the gospel in their own voices as he joined praise to proclamation so that the music and the hymn text together would help the assembly to understand and to receive the biblical text. Hearing the promised future even now. Now, the sources for Luther's music were multiple. He didn't just go down to the bar. That is an evil lie, by the way. But there is a form of German music called Bar form, and I think that's where people got confused. It's an AAB form, by the way. The sources of his music were secular folk songs that were well-known and well-sung, as well as more religious folk songs, and he provided new texts for these tunes that were called contrafacta. But Luther also adapted, as we've heard, the tunes of the Gregorian chant and even of the Meistersingers. Then he and others simply composed new ones. Let me qualify that as a composer myself, that Luther understood music to be a gift, a creation of God, not of humanity. To anyone who disbelieved that this was a gift, Luther, in typical bombastic fashion declared, and I quote, "A person who does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being. He should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs." I'm more careful with my language in general. Calvin too found music of great import, both for the praise of God and the edification of man. You know that phrase. But unlike Luther, he restricted both his textual sources, it was just the Psalter in metrical form, folks, and a single monophonic line which the congregation was instructed to sing in unison. Calvin understood music to be creation of human beings which could be used for either good or evil, so he restricted the texts to that which he understood to be holy and that was the Psalter. The music to that, which was not intended to entertain. And then there was Zwingli, who ironically was the most accomplished musician among the three reformers. In commenting on that text of Colossians 3:16, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and in gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God." Zwingli says, and I quote, "Here Paul does not teach mumbling and murmuring in the churches, but shows us the true song that is pleasing to God. That we sing the praise and glory of God not with our voices like those Jewish singers but with our hearts." Music for Zwingli was about play and joy and refreshment, but since he did not understand such material things to participate in the holy or to be bearers of grace ... We can talk about comparing eucharistic theologies here as well as music. He did not connect the human voice raised in song to be a vehicle for the word of God. Other witnesses of the radical reformation were divided on this issue. Conrad Grebel sided with Zwingli, while Thomas Muntzer encouraged his congregation to sing German hymns. But where hymnody really took hold in the Anabaptist community was in the martyr ballads. In the face of persecution, the church needed to sing and to hear the enduring love of God who has never stopped calling us his own. There would be more controversies, separatists, and non-separatists, Puritans and Quakers. The value of silence. The beauty of sound. The beauty of silence. The value of sound. 17th-century England and thus, America, was filled with these issues. By the time of Isaac Watts, the Wesleys, Whitefield, and the evangelical revival in Wales, strophic hymns had become the primary ritual strategy for sustaining and growing the multiple expressions of a reformation faith. They are short, the music repeats, most do not need accompaniment, and they can be sung in myriad settings from house church to basilica. From the brilliant acoustics of the tiled shower, I learned that again this morning at the Comfort Inn, to the glory of the open road. Everybody sounds good in the shower, by the way. I'm not saying everybody looks good, but everybody sounds good in the shower. I'm losing track you know. Portable and memorable, many Christians have their favorite hymns that they carry in their hearts for decades. Within any given hymnbook, every congregation can also develop what can only be called a hymnal within a hymnal. Like the canon within a canon. The hymnal within the hymnal. Those favorites that are tied to the parish's annual liturgical cycle, as well as to the individual believer's life. The singing of the hymnal within the hymnal becomes paramount among the ways in which the life of faith is shaped and sustained. In fact, in many congregations, the liturgical year is defined and understood through the annual cycle of seasonal and festival hymns from (singing) to (singing) to (singing) to (singing) to (singing) to (singing) to (singing) to (singing) to (singing). New hymns can be added, and over the years certain hymns will lose their hold, but this ebb and flow takes place over long extended periods of time, and this is crucial, for these hymns have become vocabulary of faith. If this habituated knowing is lost the individual and the church may become lost as well. One other thing that hymn can do to enhance the life of the church is their ability to be sung by more than one denominational expression. There are some Lutherans that I know who do not like the stated theology of the Methodists, but they would be surprised to know that the hymn they love to sing (singing) was written by a Wesley. There are plenty of Anglo-Catholics that I've been around that can dig into a sturdy evangelical Welsh hymn like (singing). Not only do hymns sing the church here around, they sing us into our neighbor's hearts. (singing) The Canadians in the room will know that one. They sing us around the world. (singing) In the hymns that we sing, God's love is sounding our voices until that great day comes when our voices will only sound his praise. For as Walter Buzin once said of the complementarity of music and theology, and I quote, "Who is content to speak a doxology? If we accept that a doxology is a song of praise to the triune God then we will find in the doxologies of Christendom another reason for insisting that theology and church music are of the same cloth, that they are twin bearers and interpreters of the Verbum Dei. If the two are twins which share each other's qualities, then will we become more aware of why Christian people should sing their theology and theologize their music. We are not surprised to note that Luther put theology and music aside of each other and that he did not subordinate music to theology. When he did subordinate, he subordinated both theology and music to the Verbum Dei, to the word of God." Even though I've known this intellectually for years, I came to know it in my body in the most profound way in the spring of 1986 when I was asked to write a tune for a new hymn text by Gracia Grindal, and it was based on Psalm 131. (singing) It was to be a Lenten hymn for sure, and it came out of my prayers in a minor mode with closed set harmonies. Suspensions that held our pain even until the final phrase. (singing) I was pregnant at the time with my second child, who, like my first, was restless in the womb and ever eager to make what would become another early appearance. As I worked on the hymn, I sang it again and again. I played it and I sang until that moment when it sounded right, and I wept, as I always do, at that moment in a joy that comes from outside of myself. Then the next day I went into labor. I had sent the hymn off to be printed and then I didn't sing it again for many months. My son was born in June. But one day the next Lent, I was at my little pump organ getting my aerobic exercises and playing and singing while my little one, my little Nels, now about eight or nine months old, was crawling about my feet. It was lent, and so I got out my latest Lenten hymn and started singing and playing, and Nels, who had been contentedly crawling around and playing with his toys became ecstatic. He pulled himself up at my knee and bounced his own little liturgical dance, and cooed and giggled as only a baby can. I finished singing the hymn and started playing another one from the standard Lenten repertoire, and he went back to crawling. I finished that hymn and then I played mine again, and he had the same response. I tried it two more times until my own tears flowed so freely that I could no longer continue but scooped him up into my arms. He had heard it in utero. He had breathed in utero. He had been surrounded by it in utero, and now he recognized it as his own. We know a sound when we hear it. We know a sound when we hear it. God gives us these hymns so that we will know why he has given us this miraculous world of sound. Indeed, why he has given us voices. God gives us these hymns so that when the last day comes we who are yet groaning in this world's travail will recognize his sound and with the voices of all the saints and angels singing us on, we will be led to his home and we will indeed know his sound when we hear it. Amen. Thank you. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming addition of the Beeson Podcast.