Sermon: Lord of Love
John 18:36
Shawnee Presbyterian Church
Shawnee, Kansas
June 4, 2023
A Huguenot Family Praying at the Table
“La Benediction de la Table”
Etching by Abraham Bosse (1602-1676)
About four years ago I heard my five-year-old granddaughter Caroline humming the tune to Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy. I told her there was a great hymn written to that tune called Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee. I asked her if she wanted to learn it and pulled out my hymnbook. For a time, we sang it almost every time we got together. I was amazed by how quickly she memorized the first few verses of the Henry Van Dyke text.
Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of Glory, Lord of love; Hearts unfold like flowers before thee, Opening to the sun above; Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, Drive the gloom of doubt away, Giver of immortal gladness, Fill us with the light of day.
Caroline still loves that hymn. We sing it to say grace before meals. She sometimes sings it as her bedtime prayer. She is now nine and she has a little sister named Margot who will soon be five. And guess what, Margot loves this hymn as well. When she began memorizing the text she had trouble pronouncing all of the words. In her rendition, “Joyful, joyful” sounded like “Jerful, jerful.” “Lord of love” came across as “Yord of yuv.”
Sometimes I find Margot humming the tune. And when that happens she looks up at me with a sly grin on her face and a twinkle in her eye and says, “This is your song, Papa!” “Joyful, Joyful” has never been my favorite hymn. I can think of a dozen hymns I like better. But my granddaughters have given it to me. It has become a bond that both defines and energizes our relationship. And it’s not really my song, it is our song. I can’t sing it without thinking of them. They may never be able to sing it without remembering me.
What my granddaughters have done with this hymn is something of a miracle. They have chosen to love it and they have used it to teach me that I am not in control of the relationship we share. I am not in charge. They are choosing the music. They are reminding me of an important truth about our relationship with God. The Lord of love we celebrate and worship in this hymn is giving us a song. A song that is always at work in our hearts and transforming us in ways we do not expect. A song that changes us not from the top down but from the inside out.
A similar dynamic was at the heart of the exchange between Pilate and Jesus in the 18th chapter of John. As a provincial Roman governor Pilate was heavily invested in the assumption that power always flows from the top down. It is his job to impose Roman rule in a province that resists it. There is in fact an active insurgency seeking to throw off Roman rule led by people called the zealots. When Jesus comes before him, Pilate wants to know if this man is a leader of that insurgency. That’s why he asks Jesus if he aspires to be a king. It is Pilate’s job to use military force and mass executions to root out the zealots and all the others who oppose Roman rule. If Jesus is one of them, Pilate will have no mercy in sentencing him to a brutal execution.
The safest reply for Jesus would have been a simple “no.” Or he could have briefly acknowledged the Roman contribution to better roads and a stronger trade-based economy. That is an answer that could have given Pilate a way to avoid condemning Jesus to die on a cross. But Jesus refuses to give Pilate an easy way out. He also refuses to tell the zealots what they want to hear. He does not use the language of resistance or claim the authority of an earthly king. He will not be a king like David, leading an army to throw the Romans out. Instead, Jesus answers Pilate by claiming a different kind of leadership that must have sounded bizarre to the Roman governor. He says to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world (John 18:36).”
Jesus came to bring a different kind of kingdom. His kingdom is not built on military or political power, imposing authority from the top down. Jesus’ kingdom is built on the song that flows from the Lord of love. The song that binds people to God and one another. The song that empowers ordinary people to change the world from the bottom up. The power of that song was something neither Pilate nor the zealots could understand. “My kingdom is not from this world.”
These words of Jesus resonated in the hearts and minds of the Protestants of France who found their world turned upside down in the seventeenth century. Louis XIV was determined to destroy Protestant faith and worship within his kingdom and any other European country he could conquer. It is significant that Louis XIV’s first act of persecution against his Protestant subjects was a law prohibiting the public singing of the psalms. Louis had almost certainly heard the Huguenots sing and he knew their devotion to their songs distinguished them from his other subjects. He probably understood that singing these songs of faith was what defined them and energized them as a people. To Louis, these Protestants were kind of a quirky minority group. He didn’t understand them and he had no desire to tolerate them. Louis began by trying to take away their songs but soon moved on to harsher measures. In a classic example of power imposed from the top down he issued an edict in 1685 that outlawed Protestant faith and worship in France. He did it in the name of religion, calling for everyone to adopt his version of Catholicism.
On one level, Louis’ edict worked very well. He had the power to make it stick. In just a few months every Protestant church building in the country was destroyed depriving Huguenots of their last legal place to sing. Another sign of success for the king was that his Protestant subjects did not follow the way of the zealots. They did not challenge Louis’ authority in an armed rebellion. But at a more profound level Louis’ edict failed.The edict failed because the singing continued. About 200,000 Huguenots successfully fled the country and learned to sing the Lord’s song in foreign lands. This massive exodus deprived France of some of its best educated and most productive citizens. The Huguenots who were left behind in France, numbering more than 500,000, took their singing underground. They worshiped in their homes or in isolated wilderness settings. They called themselves the “church of the desert.” When religious freedom was finally restored in France more than a hundred years later, 500,000 Protestants came out into the light of day. Their king destroyed their churches but he couldn’t kill the songs. Singing connected them to the Lord of love who was changing them from the inside out.
My new book tells the story of a large group of these French Protestant exiles who fled to England and then settled along the Rappahannock River of Virginia during the last decade of the seventeenth century. Because they didn’t establish a town and weren’t legally permitted to have their own church they have remained hidden from historians—until now. The records suggest this French exile community may have included as many as a thousand refugees—perhaps the largest seventeenth-century Huguenot community in North America. I am convinced this is a story that deserves to be told.
By bringing their song across the Atlantic these immigrants, like so many others who have come since, have shown us how to keep singing even when our world is turned upside down. They knew the song that connects us to the Lord of love. A song that creates a bond that is far stronger than the rulers or powers of this world.
We, too, live in trying times. We are assaulted by strident voices seeking to drown out the songs that God has given us. Voices that are selling top down power solutions and doing it in the name of religion. These solutions are never about love, but about dividing and controlling those who are different from them or people they don’t understand. Do not believe these voices and never be intimidated by the powers they unleash. Our task is not to win the political or cultural struggles of our time. Our task is to change the world from the bottom up by the power of the Christ who lives in our hearts.
Remember that God has given us a song. A song we can sing before meals. A song we can sing before we go to bed. A song that will center our lives on God’s priorities of grace, mercy, and peace. A song that will steady us when our world is turned upside down. A song that will embrace us when death comes. No power can ever destroy this song. No one can take it from us. It is the song that binds us to the Lord of love.
Huguenot Women Singing at Home
“The Wise Virgins”
Etching by Abraham Bosse (1602-1676)
