The following introduction and invitation to reflect comes from www.umcdiscipleship.org. You are encouraged to meditate and pray with this week’s lectionary text throughout the coming week.
This week’s reading from Ephesians continues the theme of transformation—personal, congregational, and network-wide—of last week’s reading.
Today, Paul gives us another frame to understand why these transformations are so important for us. They are about ensuring we can “live not as unwise people, but as wise.”
Last week, we explored one set of corporate practices essential in our transformation: small groups that hold us accountable and support the changes we need to make so God’s Spirit can transform us.
This week, Paul gives us another set of corporate practices he sees as means of grace by which we can receive and grow in such wisdom: congregational singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, and congregational and personal practices of thanksgiving.
“Holy solitaries” is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness (”from the preface to the 1739 collection, Hymns and Sacred Poems)
This is also why these collections of hymns were made to be sung not merely at meetings—whether of the society as a whole, or in the class meetings, but also as part of the daily practice of each individual Methodist, wherever they would go. The form of the hymnals as books was of such a size as to fit in a pocket so that more and more these psalms and hymns and spiritual songs could become the “playlist” of each Methodist, and the collection as a whole their “iPod.”
The primary means by which Christians offer their thanksgiving to God together (Ephesians 5:20) is the Great Thanksgiving. This is why Christians have gathered at least weekly for most of the history of the church, East and West, not only to hear the word and sing hymns of praise, but also to celebrate at the Table of the Lord.
Wisdom from psalms, hymns, spiritual songs and thanksgiving? Really? Really! We learn what we sing more profoundly and more permanently than what we say or hear. And when we express gratitude together, we are enabled to overcome and begin to rewire our brains away from their inherent focus on ourselves individually and what’s wrong, a pessimism that leads to paralysis, and are enabled to imagine and bring about more of what’s good for all.
Isn’t that exactly Paul’s point? We move away drunkenness, a self-indulgent and negative behavior (5:18). And instead, we embrace personal and corporate practices that redound to wisdom, goodness and joy, with psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, and acts of thanksgiving.