A Thousand Times and I Never Heard It

Sonia's son asked her what a line meant and she could not tell him.

He was nineteen and home for the weekend and he was not trying to catch her out. They had the radio on, and something came on that she has known since she was about four, and she was doing what she does, which is sing along at a volume nobody asked for while making toast.

And Kwesi said, "What does that bit mean?"

And she said, "What bit?"

And he sang it back at her. One line. Eight words.

And Sonia opened her mouth and closed it again.

She has sung that chorus, at a conservative estimate, a thousand times. School. Sunday. Her grandmother's kitchen. Two funerals. In the car for about twenty years. She could do the harmony line if you put her on the spot.

And she could not tell you what the words were saying.

Not because it is complicated. It is eight words long. It is because she had never once, in forty-one years, looked at it as a sentence. It had always been a sound: a shape her mouth makes, in a particular order, at a particular point in the tune.

She said, "Give me a minute."

She went and looked it up properly, on the Saturday, at that same counter, with her toast going cold and her son watching her with the mild interest of a boy who has started something he did not expect.

And what she found was that the line is not a nice sentiment at all. It is a doctrine. A dense one. Somebody put an entire argument into eight words and set it to a tune so that four year olds could carry it around in their mouths for forty years without noticing what they had.

And Sonia stood at that counter with a book open and said, out loud, to nobody, "That is what I have been singing?"

And Kwesi, who is nineteen and has no reverence at all, said, "You have been carrying a whole sermon around in your mouth since you were four and never opened it."

Now let me ask you which one is yours.

There is a line. You have sung it since before you understood anything. And if somebody stopped you in the street and asked what it means you would produce a general answer with a warm shape and not much in it.

There is a hymn inside the letter

Paul is writing to a young pastor about how to conduct himself, and in the middle of it he does something that scholars have argued about for centuries and that anybody can see just by looking at the shape on the page.

He quotes a song.

He who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.1 Timothy 3:16

Six lines. Balanced in pairs. It does not read like the rest of the letter and it is not meant to: Paul stops arguing and drops in something the churches were already singing.

Now count what is in those six lines. The incarnation. The resurrection. The witness of heaven. The mission to the nations. Faith across the world. The ascension.

That is the entire Christian story, in a form short enough to be sung by people who could not read, in a century when most of them could not.

That is what these things are. Not decoration on the outside of the faith. The delivery mechanism.

So hear this said over you, at the counter with the toast going cold. You are carrying the actual content of the faith in your mouth already, put there by somebody who wanted it to survive in you, and the fact that you never unpacked it does not mean it has not been working. That is written into a New Testament letter, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a line alive in a person for forty-one years, which is a good deal longer than most sermons last.

Now let me say the thing to the part of you that is embarrassed.

You did not fail at anything.

You were four. Somebody put a sentence in your mouth and set it to a tune, which is exactly the right thing to do with a four year old, and it stayed. That is the design working, not a person being shallow.

And here is why it matters that it stayed even unexamined.

Because it has been available.

That is what the old ones do. They sit in you, unopened, through decades when you do not need them, and then one afternoon something happens and the mouth produces it before the mind has caught up, and what comes out is not a warm sentiment, it is a doctrine, and it holds because it is true and not because it is comforting.

Paul and Silas are in a cell at midnight with their backs opened up and their feet in stocks, and Scripture says they were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening. Not composing. Singing, which means singing something that already existed, in the worst hour of their lives, from memory, in the dark.

They had it because somebody had put it in them.

And the word says to let the word of Christ dwell richly in you, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings it up at the right moment and who opens a line when a person finally goes and looks.

Let me guard the two ends of it.

You do not have to go and study every hymn you know. That is not what this is. Look at one line. One.

And knowing what it means will not make it work better. That is important. It has been working for forty-one years unexamined and it was not waiting for your permission. Understanding it is a gift for you, not a repair to it.

There was a man five hundred years ago who put doctrine into verses deliberately, because he had noticed that people forget sermons and keep songs, and he said that what he could not get into a head through the ear he would get in through the mouth. He was not being clever. He was being practical, and it worked, and you are one of the results.