Homily for Cantate Monday at Matins (Isaiah 12)

Alleluia! Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Boys and girls, yesterday was Cantate Sunday in the Church, named from the introit of the day that started out with the words: Cantate Domino cancticum novum: O sing to the Lord a new song. 

Our reading from Isaiah was specifically chosen to match the theme of that day, and especially its final words: 5 “Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously; let this be made known in all the earth. 6 Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.”

YOU and all the baptized are the inhabitants of Zion and the Holy One of Israel is truly great and in your midst, and so your calling is to sing His praises and make His great deeds known to the ends of the earth. 

Never in the whole history of the human race has there been anything close to the explosion of joyful singing that erupted in Christ’s Church after His resurrection from the dead. Wisely did St. Augustine observe: “We are an Easter people and alleluia is our song!” 

The very earliest description we have of Christian worship by a pagan is a letter which the Roman Governor Pliny the Younger sent to Emperor Trajan. He had been investigating Christians and hadn’t found anything particularly treasonous about them. He did note, however, on a stated day they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak and to sing a hymn among themselves to Christ, as God. 

Christians from the get go gathered to sing the praises of Jesus: they did so in what we call Matins and Vespers and also in the Divine Service.. Some of those earliest and most ancient of hymns have come down to us and are being sung even today: the Phos Hilaron of Evening Prayer (Joyous Light of Glory)—so ancient that at the time of St. Basil the Great (who died in the fourth century) he said that this piece was so old in his day no one knew who wrote it!  Same with the Gloria in Excelsis of the Divine Service, or the Te Deum Laudamus of Matins. In all of them, we  indeed address Christ as God while proclaiming His praises by announcing the great deeds of His salvation: “You are worthy of being praised with pure voices forever, O Son of God, O Giver of life, the Universe proclaims Your glory.” “O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us; Thou that takest away the sin of the world, receive our prayer; Thou that sittest at the right hand of God the Father almighty, have mercy upon us. For Thou only art holy, Thou only art the Lord, Thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father.. Amen.” “When You took upon Yourself to deliver Man, You humbled Yourself to be born of Virgin, when You had overcome the sharpness of death, You opened the Kingdom of heaven to all believers. You sit at the right hand of God, in the glory of the Father, we believe that You will come to be our judge.” 

And when the great Reformation of the Church took place in the 16^th century, the song of the Church was renewed again. And the joy of Jesus’ salvation was put into hymns and anthems, like Luther’s great hymn we just sang: “Dear Christians, One and All Rejoice.” You, children, are part of the Lutheran Church and our Church has been known since the Reformation as “the singing Church.” Sometimes we have guests join us who are Roman Catholic, and it’s always fun to see the look on their faces when we pull out one of our 10 stanza hymns to sing! To them, three stanzas is ideal; four is pushing it and five is intolerable. But we don’t care. We LIKE to sing! The joy we have that on His cross Jesus poured His blood and covered the sin of the world, the joy we have that by His resurrection He has punched a hole through death and will lead us through, the joy we have in the gift of His Holy Spirit and His Spirit’s Word imparting to us faith and filling us with love and hope: these joys simply HAVE to be sung. You can’t just speak them. Impossible.

So, as we gather around the “wells of salvation”—the means of grace, the Word and the Holy Sacraments— we belt out the Lord’s praise with the help of our musicians. We preach the Lord’s Gospel in our song and we pray that our song will carry that Gospel to the ends of the earth that others too may join us in the joy of singing to the Lord a new song, a hymn of resurrection victory in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Alleluia! Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!