Free to Sing in Faith

By Taylor Schmidt

As traditional and confessional Lutherans, we sing. It’s what we do. This has been made even more real to me through my attendance at four Higher Things Conferences as well as my stint as a College Conference Volunteer (CCV) in Iowa this summer. Worship is a key component of the time we spend there, and there’s a reason for that: Singing has a way of feeding our faith.

We sing the Divine Liturgy. We sing the Psalms. We sing theology-packed hymns. We sing the Word of God. If we go back to the creation of man, we read: “then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7). This is God down in the dirt, forming and breathing into man life! Man became a living creature. This means that the man breathed back! From God, we received life. We always receive. Without God, we are and have nothing. This is much like the Divine Service. The pastor, who is standing in the place of Christ, sings to us Christ’s words, and then we sing them back!

Let us take a look at the liturgy of Divine Service Setting Two. In the Kyrie, the pastor chants, “In peace let us pray to the Lord.” We chant or sing back, “Lord, have mercy.” Again, our pastor chants, “For the peace from above and for our salvation let us pray to the Lord.” We respond with “Lord, have mercy.” This goes on yet a little longer. The pastor chants, we chant back. The Word is sung into our ears, and we sing the Word back into the ears of all those around us. In Matins, we proclaim “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.” In the Introit, we sing and pray the psalms together. The pastor sings and we respond, back and forth. When we sing “Lord, have mercy” or “O Lord, open my lips,” we are praying as a congregation! The hymns, the liturgy, and the psalms are all forms of prayer that we sing and chant as one voice.

When we know this, why would we not sing louder? Through the psalms, liturgy, and hymns, we sing our very confession of faith.

Recently at my church, we spoke the liturgy because we were without an organist. We spoke boldly our confession. Luther said that after the Word of God, music is the greatest treasure in the world, but it is the confession that can stand alone. If we speak our confession with boldness and confidence, why wouldn’t we also sing it that way? We are sinners in need of saving, and those sins have been washed away by the blood of the Lamb. You are free to sing like you have been saved... because you have been! You are free to sing like you have been forgiven. Christ saved you... from death! From Satan! Sing! Proclaim! Praise! You aren’t going to hell! You will be with God for all eternity instead of rotting in the fiery damnation of Satan’s dominion. This is most definitely something to rejoice about.

We read in Isaiah 6 that God sanctified Isaiah’s lips and set them free to proclaim, sing, and confess. Isaiah confesses he is a sinner: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5), but it doesn’t stop there. “Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for’” (Isaiah 6:6-7). We are all Isaiahs. We are sinners, but we have been sanctified by Christ. We have been set free in the truth of the Gospel. We are free from our bondage and slavery to sin so that now we may sing at the top of our lungs. In fact, to sing is just the thing to do. Rejoice in your freedom from Satan, death and the world by singing!

Do not be afraid of your own voice. Do not worry about that note you just sang off-key. You don’t have to have perfect pitch. This is our sinful flesh looking inward at ourselves. We begin to think, “I would just make it worse, so I won’t sing at all.” Instead, look outward at those around us who need the Word of God preached and sung into their ears, and this includes ourselves! It is not about how perfect it is or sounds. Rather, it is about the content of what is being sung or chanted. Just think: if you sing louder, someone else might decide that they, too, can sing louder. When everyone sings louder, the congregation begins to sound like one voice, one sound coming from the Body of Christ. Our prayers rise to heaven, and we do not sing alone. We sing with all the saints. We sing with the cherubim and the seraphim. You don’t hear it with your earthly ears. It is one of those heavenly wonders, a mystery we know and receive solely by faith And while it’s absolutely heavenly to sing as a part of a large group like we do at each Higher Things conference, we can remember these things as we sing in our local churches as well.

“Te Deum Laudamus” is Latin for “You, O God, we praise.” Coming to the Lord’s house is never about us. It is always about receiving Christ and His saving promises and rejoicing about it! So, please, stop being afraid of your voice. We receive, pray, and return thanksgiving to Christ, the Son of the Living God, who has seen our sinful condition. He was crucified for us. He washed us. He cleansed us. Why? So we could be heirs of His kingdom, “here in time” and “there in eternity.”

Taylor Schmidt recently started her sophomore year of college and is currently undecided about her plans in life. She lives in Excelsior Springs, Missouri where she attends a faithful church receiving the Word and Sacraments of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. She can be contacted at taylor. schmidt13@yahoo.com.