I ordered a book of sheet music this week, and upon opening it for the first time, I had to laugh. The first song in the book was O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing. Since the book was a United Methodist hymnal supplement, I shouldn’t have been surprised. O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing has been the first song in each Methodist Hymnal since it was included in A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists… all the way back in 1780. Despite being numbered 57, it’s still the first actual hymn in the hymnal today. But I laughed not about that piece of trivia. I laughed because my brother loves this song. And my Mom hates it.
My brother had a children’s choir director who taught him this song sometime when he was very young at Berkmar United Methodist Church in Lilburn, Georgia. For him, it brings back fond memories of fun times with Mrs. Sandy. My mom learned this song growing up in Hazardville Methodist Church in Hazardville Connecticut. She doesn’t have a good reason for hating it. She just thinks 4 verses of anything should get the job done, whereas this song has seven verses, and she’s tired of singing by the end of it (When I feel like messing with her, I remind her that Charles Wesley originally wrote 18 verses to this song. You can clip over to page 58 in the hymnal to see most of them).
People have been seeing the same things differently from each other for a very long time. Even experiences with God. Nicodemus came to Jesus at night because he heard his teachings very differently than his fellow Pharisees who plotted against Jesus. Only 1 of the 10 lepers recognized God’s power in his healing enough to thank Jesus for it. The pandemic is pretty universally affecting us right now. But we don’t all experience it universally or similarly. I hope we all have compassion for those who see things differently than us, those who are more or less frustrated than we each are, those who are more or less isolated than we each are. And as as Jesus “bids our sorrows cease,” may we truly find his name “life, and health, and peace.”
