I love to sing hymns and choruses
and worship songs; in fact, I love to sing all kinds of music, and I’ve always
got some song or other roaming around in my mind. Having said that, it isn’t just the music -
the words are just as important to me, and the thing about the very finest
hymns for me is the way in which word and tune support and enhance each other to
produce something that strikes through to the heart.
It’s worth my mentioning that hymn
singing as a congregational activity doesn’t go back all that far as a
tradition in worship - really to the new independent congregations that began
to flower in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eventually, of course, hymns were sung
everywhere, and there was a huge flowering of hymn writing from the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries onward. Before
that time carols would have been sung, not only at Christmas but on many other
occasions through the year, but carols weren’t sung in church services - they
were songs of the people, sung out in the streets, and disapproved of, I should
think, by the authorities and hierarchies of the Church.
That would have been true of hymns
as well, to begin with. The idea of the
whole congregation joining together to sing something would to some have
sounded rather subversive: it might encourage enthusiasm, which might seem fine
to us, surely it’s good to be enthusiastic, but then would not have been
welcome, for enthusiasm would lead to a loss of order and control.
Of the early writers of hymns in
the English language none were more prolific than Charles Wesley. We continue to sing so many of his hymns today,
because they still work - partly because they’re all so firmly rooted in
scripture, and also because they spring from his own very real experience of personal
conversion.
My personal top three of Charles Wesley’s hymns would have to include ‘Jesu, lover of my soul’ and ‘And can it be?’, which are both hymns that have their roots in the story of his conversion. The other would be one that’s surely in nearly everybody’s list, the one I’d like to spend a little time on this afternoon, ‘Love divine, all loves excelling.’
These days we’re probably most
likely to sing this hymn to the fairly modern Welsh tune ‘Blaenwern’, but there
are quite a few other tunes - including the one called ‘Love divine’, which is
a four line tune rather than eight lines.
Whenever I hear that tune, I’m transported back to a Sundayschool outing
back in childhood days, when I must have been about seven or eight years old. I suppose we
must have sung it then. But Charles Wesley
actually wrote the words to be sung to Purcell’s tune ‘Precious Isle’, which
was then very popular in the theatres and halls. Wesley thought that it was too good a tune to
be wasted on secular audiences; it’s
interesting to reflect on what tunes he might pick on were he still writing
today - maybe he’d want to write Christian words to the theme tune of Eastenders
(I do believe someone has).
But what a hymn he wrote! What amazing words! Of course, it isn’t a hymn about a thing
called love; it’s a hymn about a person
called love, indeed, about the man
whose very nature is love. You’ll be aware, I’m sure, of one particular way you
can use the reading I used earlier on, Paul’s wonderful chapter thirteen of his
First Letter to Corinth. As you read
through the passage, with all the things Paul has to tell us about love, you
can take out the word ‘love’ each time and replace it with the name of Jesus - and
as you do that you see that Paul too wasn’t thinking about a thing called love,
but of the person who had changed and transformed his life when he wrote those
words. Then you can replace the name of
Jesus with your own name: which gives us the challenge of discipleship, that’s shows
what we’re called to live up to.
What a challenge that is! But it’s not a challenge we have to attempt on
our own. Charles Wesley writes: ‘Love
divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down.’ This is his poetic description of our Lord,
and of his Holy Spirit. A hundred years later, Christina Rossetti wrote ‘Love
came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine.’ This is God’s decisive act of salvation: Jesus Christ is the joy of heaven come down
to earth, born at Bethlehem, walked the byways of Galilee and Judaea, died at
Calvary and yet three days later was walking in the garden and blessing his
disciples.
Jesus tells his disciples that he
will be with them until the end of time.
He will no longer be physically present among them, they won’t see him any
more, but they will know him by the gift of his Holy Spirit. And you only have to read the story of the
first Christian Pentecost to know that this is a love that’s not rationed out, it’s
not something that comes in small measures.
Charles Wesley knew that very well, he knew how love had flooded into
his heart at his conversion.
‘Fix in us thy humble
dwelling; all thy faithful mercies
crown.’ Until this happened to Charles
Wesley, he’d got only half way to where and what God was calling him to
be. He was already an ordained minister,
and engaged in revival and mission; and he
was able, compassionate, prayerful, learned and thoughtful about the faith, and
totally dedicated. But as yet there’s still a separation between him and
God; as yet he’s still trying to earn
God’s approval. I think that his anxiety
to strive ever harder, to do more and more, had in fact worn him out, and made
him ill. So at the time of his
conversion Wesley was a troubled soul.
He worried about whether he was good enough, whether he was working hard
enough. He’d had a difficult experience
as an evangelist in America and had come back home filled with a sense of failure. But everything would change for Charles
Wesley on the feast of Pentecost, Whit Sunday, in 1738.
He’d been in close touch with a
Moravian pastor named Peter Bohler, who’d led him to study verses, for example
in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, that spoke of the need for a personal faith
in Jesus - indeed, for a personal relationship with Jesus. He read Martin Luther’s commentary on
Galatians, where in the verse Galatians chapter two verse 20 - “And the Son of
God loved me, and gave himself for me” - Luther had placed particular stress on
that word “me”. This had a profound
effect on Charles Wesley, who was then about thirty years of age, and the
conviction never left him, that this love divine is to be experienced in a
profoundly personal way.
One way in which I’ve heard it
expressed is that God doesn’t love people. It’s not people en masse he loves, but each
individual person, the unique spark of his creative will that each one of us
is. He loves us despite our own failures
in love, he loves us despite our apathy and hatred and deceit. He is the man who prayed forgiveness on those
who hammered the nails that fixed him to the cross: “They do not know what they
are doing.” And the love he has for me,
and for you, and for each individual person, well, it’s as though each one of
us was the only person he loved. He
loves each one of us with that recognition, with that compassion, with that
intensity.
That’s not something we could ever
do; often we struggle to show that
measure of love to even one other human being.
But our own human attempts at love are never more than a pale reflection
of his love divine. We may demand a return
on our love; but God loves us even when
we don’t love him back. I’m always inspired by that wonderful picture by Holman
Hunt, ‘The Light of the World’, in which our Lord stands at the door, and knocks,
and waits. He waits for us with an
infinite patience; he waits for us to open the door and let him in. We’re unfinished and incomplete without him,
and he longs to complete his work of love within us - but always he waits for us
to invite him in.
This is something the Church has a
special opportunity to reflect on at this time of the year. Between Easter and Pentecost we take time to
think about the ways in which our Lord appeared to his disciples - not just to
assure them that he truly was risen from the dead, but also to prepare them for
what would happen next, for the new relationship that would begin with the gift
of the Holy Spirit. God would be with his people in a new and dramatic way, and
the Church whose story begins at Pentecost is not supposed to be a band of folk
who gather to remember Jesus and to tell and share stories of a figure from
distant history, but a pilgrim people who are living and walking with Jesus
today. As Paul writes, “We have the mind
of Christ”; and we remember how Jesus
said to his disciples in the upper room, “Receive my Spirit”, and breathed into
them the spirit of power and authority and love.
But let me return to Wesley’s
wonderful words. He writes
“Jesu,
thou art all compassion,
pure
unbounded love thou art,
visit
us with thy salvation,
enter
every trembling heart.”
Pure, unbounded love: there are no
limits here, no limits to the depth and intensity and clarity of this love, no
bounds or barriers to limit its reach, no-one excluded from its gracious touch,
except by our own choosing.
Charles Wesley’s own experience of this love as his own personal gift, not granted him because of the earnestness of his endeavours, the quality of his sacrifice, the hardness of his labours, but just there for him, freely and graciously bestowed, set him back on the right road. Elsewhere in this hymn (we don’t always sing this verse), he writes “Breathe, O breathe thy Holy Spirit into every troubled heart.” That was what it had been like for him. He discovered that he had to invite God into the whole of his own self, but he also discovered that this was all he had to do.
There were no special incantations
needed, no liturgy. It didn’t have to
happen in any special place, or at any particular time. Pure unbounded love thou art. There were no tests or examinations he had to
pass to prove himself worthy, no fire to walk through, no list of achievements
to audit. Visit us with thy
salvation. This is about being saved from
the otherwise certain failure of even our best intentions.
Enter every trembling heart. At the heart of the hymn is Wesley’s desire
that everyone should share the experience that had so transformed his
life. It was an experience his brother
John shared it some three days later. Love divine is a wonderful thing, but it
isn’t enough just to know about it and to sing about it; we have to live in it and live by it, and as
we do this to set our hearts on all that’s there in Paul’s wonderful words in I
Corinthians 13.
So, to conclude, I do hope we’ll
never get to think of hymns like ‘Love Divine’ as crusty and old, even though
we’re two and a half centuries further on from the time when they were
written. For me Wesley’s words are as
full of freshness and life as ever. His
conversion led to a great outpouring of hymns, and these hymns of his were I
guess part of God’s gift and blessing on him, and essential to the birth of
Methodism and to the Evangelical Revival of those days.
Enter every trembling heart; our
motivation in mission is that we know that our Lord is waiting to do just
that. He isn’t somewhere far away, so
that you need to shout for him to hear you, he isn’t so separate and holy that you
have to be consumed by worry about whether you’re good enough. That’s something you can leave him to sort out. All you have to do, all I have to do, is ask,
as he stands, waiting, at the door of our hearts. For this is love divine, all loves excelling,
here is our Lord waiting to finish his new creation in us, waiting to make us
clean, waiting to make us worthy, waiting to complete within us the transformation
of love.
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