Psalm 29 A Psalm of David
Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength. 2 Ascribe to the LORD the glory of his name; worship the LORD in holy splendor. 3 The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over mighty waters. 4 The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is full of majesty. 5 The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars; the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon. 6 He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox. 7 The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire. 8 The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness; the LORD shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. 9 The voice of the LORD causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare; and in his temple all say, “Glory!” 10 The LORD sits enthroned over the flood; the LORD sits enthroned as king forever. 11 May the LORD give strength to his people! May the LORD bless his people with peace!
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1 Corinthians 10:23-31 – 23 “All things are lawful,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up. 24 Do not seek your own advantage, but that of the other. 25 Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience, 26 for “the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s.” 27 If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. 28 But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, out of consideration for the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience – 29 I mean the other’s conscience, not your own. For why should my liberty be subject to the judgment of someone else’s conscience? 30 If I partake with thankfulness, why should I be denounced because of that for which I give thanks? 31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.
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Mark 7:24-37 – 24 From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25 but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 26 Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27 He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 28 But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.” 30 So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
31 Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32 They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34 Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” 35 And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36 Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37 They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
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Welcome to the final installation of our summer series on hymns!
Today’s hymn is a bit different from the ones we’ve looked at before. The hymns we’ve done up to this point were over 500 years old, and they were inspired by events around the Protestant Reformation. Because of this, there was a lot of heavy theology in those songs.
Not so much with today’s hymn. Today’s hymn comes from a more recent time and is closer to us and where we are today, than the hymns we’ve looked at so far.
Today’s hymn – To God Be the Glory – comes from a time when revival was on people’s minds and hearts, both spiritually and socially. This was the time of the ‘camp meetings,’ when people would worship outdoors, sometimes for days, camping on-site. The camp meetings were designed to reach the lost for Jesus, and to raise money to feed the hungry and help the poor.
The story behind To God Be the Glory is a very personal one – both in terms of who wrote it, and in terms of the faith being expressed in it.
Let me start today with the story of the hymn-writer, because her life was truly miraculous. The woman who wrote To God Be the Glory was Frances Jane Crosby, better known as Fanny Crosby. She was born in 1820 and died in 1915 – living almost 95 years! – and she was active in ministry for most of those years. She lived most of her life in New York City. Her ancestors included some of the Mayflower families: Puritans who came to the New World to escape religious persecution. (Just as an aside, Fanny Crosby was also related to Bing Crosby – they shared a common ancestor.)
Fanny Crosby was a lifelong Methodist – Methodist Episcopal, since the United Methodist Church didn’t exist back then. She started writing hymns at the age of six. That’s remarkable enough, but what makes it even more remarkable is the fact that Fanny Crosby was blind. Historians are not sure whether she was born blind, or if her eyes were damaged by treatments for an eye infection when she was six weeks old, but the net result was Fanny never remembered being able to see.
But she never let her blindness hold her back. At a very early age, Fanny Crosby set herself a goal: she wanted to
“win a million people to Christ through her hymns, and whenever she wrote a hymn she prayed it would bring women and men to Christ, and [she] kept careful records of those reported to have been saved through her hymns.”[1]
(Which, by the way, should be an encouragement to all of us: if a work of art touches us, if it inspires our life in some way, it’s a good thing to write or email the people whose creativity blesses us. The vast majority of musicians and authors and poets and other creative people never know whose lives they touch by doing what they do – and it can be a great encouragement to them to hear from someone who has been blessed by their work.)
I don’t know if Fanny ever hit that “one million” mark, but her hymns certainly touched many lives, and they still do. I pray that God will likewise give each one of us a vision of what we are created to do that will bless others. And just one more side note: Fanny Crosby wrote hundreds of hymns during her lifetime, some of which you might recognize: “Blessed Assurance”, “Tell Me the Story of Jesus”, and “Near the Cross” among many others.
Fanny Crosby attended school at the New York Institute for the Blind, which she entered at the age of 15 – and then she joined the faculty at age 22. She taught English, rhetoric, and ancient history. (There wasn’t much this woman could not do!) And in her spare time, Fanny was also a lobbyist: she spoke before both the Senate and the House of Representatives in Washington DC on behalf of education and schools for the blind; and she was personal friends with Presidents James Polk and Grover Cleveland.
Fanny married a fellow teacher from the New York Institute – a man who was also blind, and who just happened to work as an organist on the side. You might think this would be handy for a hymn-writer to be married to an organist, but ironically the two of them never actually collaborated. Their ministries were in different places.
The couple had one child together, who sadly died in infancy. Other than that they did well; but as time went on they discovered they didn’t get along all that well as a couple, and eventually Fanny and her husband Van separated. They never divorced; they remained in touch with each other, and remained friends, for the rest of their lives.
(Hell’s Kitchen: )
As a woman living alone, Fanny learned how to live on very little. Even though she had a job, and even though she had some royalties coming in from her poetry – as John Wesley taught, Fanny gave away anything she didn’t absolutely need. Eventually she ended up living in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, and then in the Bowery – both locations that movies have been made out of, for how miserable the conditions were back then. Fanny lived during the times those movies are made about, and she personally provided for the needs of immigrants and the poor while she lived among them.
The hymn To God Be the Glory was written around 1870 and published between 1870 and 1875. Oddly enough, the hymn was heard first by British musicians while they were visiting New York, and they took it back home to England, where the hymn became wildly popular during British revivals of the late 1800s – and in fact was included in the British Methodist Hymn Book in 1933.
But To God Be the Glory was never widely known here in the United States – until it was discovered by Cliff Barrows, the music director for the Billy Graham Crusades. Cliff Barrows introduced the hymn to the Crusades in 1954 and its popularity took off.
So with all of this as background, what’s the message Fanny Crosby wanted to share in this hymn?
Different people have answered that question in different ways. Some people have said the hymn is “a planet-wide call to worship”. Others have said it’s a description of how people are redeemed, and how redemption works. For me, the best place to start is I Corinthians 10:31, where Paul writes: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.” To God Be the Glory.
With all of this said, I’d like to turn to our scripture readings for today, which point in the same direction.
In Psalm 29, King David, the author, starts off by saying “ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.” David goes on to praise (1) the greatness of God that can be found in nature; (2) the greatness of God that can be found in God’s word, the Bible; and (3) the greatness of God expressed in the praises of God’s people as they worship in the temple.
So what exactly is glory? If someone asked for a definition, what would we say?
Glory is a word we hear a lot in the Bible, and we know glory is a good thing. David comes close to answering the question in Psalm 29, where he says God’s voice thunders, and controls mighty waters (I was thinking: if you’ve ever tried to control water at all, even in a bathtub, you know how tough it is to get water to go where you want it to go. But God can control water!) He says God’s voice breaks cedar trees, and makes the land itself skip, and “flashes forth flames of fire”.
Glory is incredibly powerful; but it’s also incredibly good. The dictionary defines ‘glory’ as renown, fame, honor, magnificence, splendor, grandeur, majesty. ALL of that wrapped up into one.
But the greatest glory is that God was willing to set all this glory for us and for our sakes. Paul tells us in Philippians 2:7 that Jesus laid aside his power and glory:
“… taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.” – Philippians 2:7-11
That’s what God’s glory is all about.
In our New Testament reading today, in I Corinthians 10, Paul talks about glory from a different angle. He says “do everything for the glory of God”. In other words, whatever we do should shine God’s glory back on God.
Paul gives an example from a controversy that was going on back in his time. Back in his day, the early Christians used to argue over whether or not to eat meat that had been used in the worship of pagan gods. In those days most of the meat in the marketplace had, at one time or another, been used as an offering in pagan worship. There wasn’t much other meat available. Some believers believed it was wrong to eat this meat because of its association with pagan worship – and for them, not eating it was the right thing to do. Other believers believed that, since pagan gods are false gods, and therefore not gods at all – and because all things are given to us by the REAL God – it made no difference that the meat had been waved around in front of an idol. It meant nothing because the idol was nothing – so it was perfectly OK to eat.
Paul agreed with the latter argument: the idols were nothing, and it’s OK to eat. BUT if someone raised the issue – if someone said “hey! This meat you’re eating came from idol-worship” – then Paul says abstain from that meat for the sake of their conscience. It’s better not to violate someone else’s conscience.
So bottom line, believers are free to do what we know is right; but we are not free to put a stumbling block in front of someone else. To the best of our abilities, people should be able to look at the way we live and give thanks and glory to God for what they see in our lives.
To God Be the Glory being sung at Royal Albert Hall, London
Our last reading for today is from Mark chapter seven, where we read about two miraculous healings that Jesus performed. In the first healing, a Gentile woman approaches Jesus and says her young daughter is being held captive by an unclean spirit, and she asks for her healing. She knows when she asks that she has two strikes against her in society: she is Gentile, and she is a woman. Social etiquette at that time said that either one of these reasons was enough that she should not be speaking to Jesus in public. But she has heard better things about Jesus, so she doesn’t give up. And when he says to her “you don’t throw the children’s bread to the dogs” (which seems to me like a very un-Jesus-like comment – my guess is he was opening the door for her to put her faith into words) – she answered him “yes Lord, but even the dogs eat what falls from the children’s table.” And Jesus honors her faith and answers YES.
For the second healing, of the deaf man, Mark gives us a lot of detail about what Jesus did physically, but there’s one detail that’s easy for us as Americans in the 21st century to miss. Mark tells us that Jesus and the disciples were passing through a region called the Decapolis. Very few Jewish people lived in the Decapolis; so most likely this man was also a Gentile. This might be one of the reasons why Jesus took him aside and said “don’t tell people about this”.
Jesus – when he was alive on earth – was sent for the people of Israel; the time of the Gentiles had not yet come. The inclusion of Gentiles – non-Jews – into the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been predicted and prophesied in the book of Genesis. God’s promise to Abraham was: “In you all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” But till Jesus came, the Jewish people were the only people to whom the Word of God had been given. They held the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments, and all the teachings of the prophets.
The Gentiles weren’t invited in (they sometimes came in anyway BTW) but they (we) weren’t invited in as a group until after Jesus’ resurrection. In the book of Acts, when Peter was called to go to the house of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, he shared the Gospel – and the entire household believed, and they received the Holy Spirit. This was the beginning of the call to the Gentiles. This caused a scandal among the early believers, until people understood that Gentile believers were a fulfillment of prophecy.
So all of these scripture readings come together to give us glimpses of God’s glory: God’s glory in nature, in the Psalms; God’s glory in our relationships, in the book of I Corinthians; and glory in our relationship with Godself, in Mark’s Gospel.
In the hymn To God Be the Glory, Fanny Crosby gives glory to God for all this, and specifically for three things that she mentions. She gives glory to God for the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, which takes away our sin and opens the door of heaven to each one of us. She gives glory to God for the promises made in the Old Testament, which are fulfilled in Jesus. And in verse three Fanny gives us a glimpse of what we will feel when we first see Jesus in God’s Kingdom in the world to come.
In the end, when we are reunited with God face to face, we will see God’s glory. Revelation 21 describes something of what we will see in the Eternal City of God. John writes:
“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. 23 And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 25 Its gates will never be shut by day — and there will be no night there. 26 People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.” – Revelation 21:22-26
That, brothers and sisters, is the glory that is our future.
Glory is the business of eternity. For those of us who love Jesus, we will be surrounded by glory, forever and ever. For all these reasons and more, we can join with Fanny Crosby in singing “To God be the Glory!” Let’s sing verse 1 one more time…
[1] Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Crosby
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