[Gottesblog] ”If You Need Electricity to Have Church . . . ” – B.T. Ball

"If You Need Electricity to Have Church...

By B.T. Ball

 

…then you are doing it wrong.” That is what I told my fieldworkers yesterday morning as the power was out in Hamel. The entirety of the first Divine Service was without electricity. During the second Divine Service the lights came on toward the end of Pastor Weedon’s sermon. We did have full juice at the third Divine Service of the day. Before the first Divine Service, as the chairman of the board of elders was preparing the altar, he said, “well, we have done this before.” I said, “yep, for the first 19 centuries or so.” Of course he was speaking of our specific parish, and we have had church without electricity a few times since I have been here, but I responded thinking of all the saints who have gone before us who were able to gather without electric light and certainly without electric instrumentation.

The pipe organ is the king of the instruments, and I would never want to serve without one. Of course modern organs are dependent on electricity, with some notable exceptions like this one at my vicarage church. So when the power goes down, so does the organ. But that doesn’t mean that the church’s song stops. Parishes, Christians, who have learned the Lutheran Liturgy and the Hymnody of the Evangelical Lutheran Church can simply open their hymnals and then their mouths and sing, no instruments needed. We still had some yesterday though. We are blessed with many talented musicians in our congregation, so on short notice (about 45 minutes, I think) we had violin, cello, viola, oboe and more put to use to support the congregation’s song. It was great. It was even greater to have the instruments join in support of the organ when the juice came back on - all without rehearsal. It was something. But then again, we can do without. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should, but if the Church is in a pinch the Divine Service and the hymns can be sung or spoken without instruments.

Lately, Kantor has taken to not accompanying the Agnus Dei as she comes down to receive the Sacrament at the beginning of the distribution in order to head right back up to play the distribution hymns. Hearing Bugenhagen’s Agnus Dei sung in harmony a capella by the Christian Congregation about to receive the Very Body and Blood of the Lamb of God is sublime. The people of God praise the incarnate Christ, truly present under the bread and wine; praising him with the divinely created instrument - the human voice. We were made to sing, and the Scriptures direct us to do that very thing - “God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praises! For God is the King of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm!” Psalm 47:5-7

Of course what we sing makes all the difference. How we praise Him with our voices is a confession of Who He is, what He has done, and what He is doing. Along with who we are, what we are to be believing, and what we are to do. So we have hymnals, and in the LCMS, we are to exclusively use doctrinally pure ones. Just like incandescent light bulbs or LEDs, hymnals are products of advances in technology. The Church did without hymnals in the hands of people for centuries. Christians had to learn to sing by memory, but all too often they did not. The Lutheran Reformation not only put the Bible in the hands of the people, but it put hymnals in their hands too. The Pure, Scriptural Faith was to be sung, and so the True Faith was put to tune and on paper to be in every church, school and home of the Church of the Augsburg Confession. So not only are family Bibles treasures passed down, but so are the hymnals of the saints who have gone before. I have The Lutheran Hymnal my uncle Denny received on his confirmation day. It is one of the most treasured books I have. Many in our congregations have the hymnals of their ancestors. They could be a very small Kirchengesangbuch in fraktur with the name of the saint in gold on the front, or maybe a little Evangelical Lutheran Hymn-Book also without any musical notation, or maybe an old TLH like my uncle’s. They are treasures, connecting us to the saints in a tangible way. The books were held in their hands, the saints touched them and used them to open their mouths to sing praise to the Blessed Trinity. That praise is eternal, which gets us back to not having electricity.

After the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, I went down to Louisiana with some men of my congregation. We assisted for a week mucking out homes. Speaking with the pastor loci, he mentioned that they could still have church for those who either hadn’t evacuated or were starting to come back to begin the long cleanup and restoration. They could do this because they had their hymnals. They didn’t need electricity. In the face of great devastation the people of God gathered, just as Lutherans had for centuries, hymnals in hand to hear, receive, and sing. It goes without saying that if the service is run by sound board, high-def video display and an amped up band there will be some difficulty. So if you need electricity to have church, you are doing it wrong. Being able to have church without electricity not only ties us to the saints of the past who gathered by the light of the sun, oil or beeswax, it also prepares us for the future. What we face in the future on this earth as a cross-bearing, Church Militant remains to be revealed. We might go without many things, maybe even electricity (may God grant it not to be so), but we will have our hymnals, (perhaps not, which is why, like the ancient saints, we memorize our hymns). We will have the Bible. We will have the Divine Service. We will have our hymns. Whatever we face in this vale of tears we will still be the Church. And then, after this vale of tears, we will still be the the Church, but one without any need nor desire for electricity for the Lamb will be our Light. And of course we will have no need of hymnals either. Then and there in the glory, we will use our resurrected voices in praise, singing in full the hymn of heaven we now only know in part - Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus! It will be like that, without electricity, but even better; the Angels will be our Kantors. Until then, let’s do it right.