O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing...

“O for a thousand tongues to sing my great redeemer’s praise, the glories of my God and King, the wonders of his grace…” I’ve been singing this great Wesleyan hymn ever since I was able to read, some 43 years. I’m guessing that means I’ve sung it about 700 times. And for 699 of those times, I’d always just assumed that Charles Wesley longed for a thousand tongues so that he could sing praises to God a thousand times louder than he could with just his own solitary voice. I’d always assumed that Wesley wanted to be a part of a thousand voice choir, blasting out this song of adoration, so that God could hear it loud and clear, all the way up in the heavens.

But the 700th time I sang this classic hymn, over in Bay View earlier this summer, it occurred to me that Charles Wesley might have been after something other than volume with his “thousand tongues” idea.

What if what Wesley was yearning for was a thousand different ways to communicate and live the Gospel that he loved, the Gospel of Jesus Christ? What if Wesley had come to realize through his years as a revival preacher that there were people – thousands upon thousands of people – who would not and could not be moved toward faith through traditional means? What if Wesley knew what many of us who have left the Church have found out – that the creeds and formulas, the doctrines and beliefs, the structures and sermons of the Church will never be sufficient to convey the beautiful complexity of who Jesus is to an increasingly diverse and globally minded population.

Let me tell you about a friend of mine named Jim. He’s struggled mightily to overcome his addiction to substances. Over the years he’s tried various churches in search of spiritual community and support as he fights the monster of alcohol. But in churches, he’s found judgment, scorn, condescension, and the tired creeds of yesteryear. “A.A. is my church,” he tells me. I walk in there and everybody’s the same. We’re all drunks…We’re all recovering. There’s no pretense, no B.S. I feel Jesus’ presence in our little basement room more than I’ve ever felt it in your beautiful sanctuaries. We believe in life, in helping each other, in refraining from judgment, and in living one day at a time. And if that’s not the Gospel, I don’t know what is.”

A.A. and its language of a Higher Power, its practice of forgiveness – no matter how many times one stumbles - and its sense of authentic fellowship has been a form of the Gospel that Jim has embraced. It’s the Gospel in another of the thousand tongues.

Another buddy of mine named Byron volunteers three days a week at one of the largest soup kitchen’s in New York City. He grew up in the church, going every week from the time he was a little runt. But after he attended college and graduate school, he found that he couldn’t believe in so many of Christianity’s tenets – the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, or the world being created in 6 days. Because all of those church doctrines had always been so closely associated with Jesus, once Bob’s belief in those doctrines faded, he felt he had to let go of Jesus too. “We’d stand up to say those confessions and creeds, and I noticed I couldn’t get those words out of my mouth – even though they were on the page right in front of me. I figured since all the other people in the pews were saying them so easily and without any hesitation, it must just be me who had the problem. So I left.”

But about twenty years later, Bob heard about a little Episcopal church in Chelsea that shared its building with a Jewish Temple congregation. Together, these two communities had started a feeding program that provides and serves over 1300 lunches to homeless people a day. And they serve these meals face-to-face, person-to-person in the church sanctuary! “When I heard about this, I thought of that place in the gospel where Jesus says ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink,’ and ‘when you did it to the least of these you did it unto me.’ When I signed up to volunteer, I asked if there was anything I had to believe in to be a part of this program. The lady chuckled and said, ‘Yeah…you’ve got to believe that hungry people ought to be fed.’ I’ve been a part of the soup kitchen community ever since.”

Bob needed to hear the gospel in a tongue that wasn’t so concerned with ancient creeds and confessions. He heard and was transformed by the tongue of the social gospel, the gospel of feeding the hungry with no questions asked, no strings attached. Bob needed to see the gospel in a place where, as Ian Lawton puts it “people put their humanity before their ideology. “

Last, I want to tell you about Janice. She’s a trip, very new-agey but with a broad and deep background in other religions, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism. She practices yoga and silent contemplation as well, believing that they are “portals to the Divine.” Janice has always loved and been drawn to Jesus. She just can’t accept the claim that Jesus is the “only way.” “There’s no way all these other ancient, beautiful, peaceful religious paths can just be dismissed, especially since they share so much with the teachings of Jesus…Jesus is bigger than Christianity,” Janice likes to say. “Christians don’t own Jesus. Jesus would refuse to let them.”

Janice is teaching me and some of the other folks in the community I’ve started about silence and contemplation, practices that have deep deep roots in Christianity as well as other Eastern religions. The tongue Janice needed to hear the Gospel in is a silent tongue, a tongue that holds itself so that the Spirit of God might speak.

To me, these three stories of my friends – Jim, Bob, and Janice - are Pentecost stories, stories about the importance of communicating the Gospel in as many tongues and as many languages and as many forms as we possibly can. Our story from Acts 2 shows us how committed God was to allowing the Gospel to take as many forms as was necessary for all people to hear it and experience it in a way that made sense to them.

My prayer, my dream is that when you hear about someone like me or someone like Janice, Bob, or Jim, who practices or understands Jesus a little differently than you do, that you won’t be angry or frightened, dismissive or judgmental. My hope is that you will remember Acts chapter 2, the Pentecost story, and the great Wesleyan hymn – “O for a thousand tongues to sing.” For the Jesus we’re seeking to follow is bigger than any of our minds. The Jesus we’re seeking to follow is not the sole property of Christians or the Christian Church. Jesus needs to be expressed in a thousand different ways, including some that we haven’t even conceived of yet. Let’s be thankful for those who are adding their tongues to the grand chorus that Charles Wesley longed for. Amen.