The Sound of Silence

It’s been a year since the first coronavirus lockdown began. The restrictions have been temporarily relaxed a few times allowing some aspects of normal life to resume. However, even at these times the influence of the pandemic has been felt as we tried, tentatively, to pick up where we left off with the spectre of a second (and now possibly a third) wave lurking ominously in the shadows. At a very mundane and superficial level, it is a year since I last sat down for a coffee in Starbucks, a year since I went out without a face mask, and a year since I entered a public building without going through the ritual of hand sanitising.

What has it meant for you? 365 days of unemployment or wondering how to make ends meet. 365 days of loneliness, cut off from personal and meaningful relationships. More or less 365 days of full time child care. 365 days of putting off that visit to the doctor. 365 days of grief, having experienced bereavement early on. 365 days of domestic tension. 365 days of frustration and confusion. 365 days of fear and conspiracy.

365 days of silence.

Hundreds of millions of words have been written and spoken about the latest research and developments, information and false information, political successes and failures, and entertainment galore as we tuned into different media outlets to stave off the growing boredom. In that sense there has been a huge amount of noise, a continuous verbal ‘hum’ in the background, as though the whole of life is being broadcast through a badly-grounded radio set. As Christians and Churches we have made our own contributions to the noise as we put our recorded messages on YouTube, Face-Booked, blogged, and Tweeted. 

But it is 365 days since we last gathered together corporately to sing praise to God.

Does this matter? No, not if you view Church as a kind of ‘wellbeing society’. Contemporary culture has tuned us to think ‘therapeutically’. We assess significance by asking what different activities contribute to human wellbeing and whether they makes us feel good. If singing hymns and psalms makes a certain kind of religious person feel better it is of value to them but it has no more inherent value than fans singing chants at a football match, teenage girls singing along with their favourite boy band, or your dad singing ‘You are my Sunshine’ in the shower. It might be frustrating to some but it is no big deal if these things are temporarily forbidden.

As a Christian I find the complete silencing of public hymn singing disturbing. It is not the kind of enforced ‘peace and quiet’ that I need to relax. It is that kind of awesome quietness that you hear when you are out in the wilderness, completely away from civilisation, that kind of ‘quiet’ which you can feel almost as a physical presence. It is a silence which is terrifying, filled with all kinds of unknown potentials. You might not agree with my Christian faith but I would like to try and explain why this silence is so fearful and I would like you to try and imagine how things look through my eyes.

The world we live in belongs to a God who is unimaginably good, kind, loving, powerful, just, holy, and wise. His goodness is utterly beyond our imagination. If we could see Him we would be completely overwhelmed by His beauty. He would shine with the glory of a light ten thousand thousand times brighter than the sun. The vision would be breath-taking in its magnitude, its enormity, its infinity. Knowing this God is the very essence of eternal life. Such is His greatness that getting to know Him will provide employment and satisfaction for eternity. In fact this God is so good that the failure to praise Him by any creature must reflect a devilishly distorted corruption of nature, an inability to distinguish good from bad, and a numb blindness to the brilliance of a Being who is infinitely beyond us and better than us.

Delighting in God and responding to His delightfulness is what we were made for. Psalm 150 verse 6 says “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!” Many people these days are trying to be ‘at one with nature’. We can only truly do this if we are delighting in this good God because “the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims His handiwork” (Psalm 19). Sincerely praising God aligns us with the cosmos!

If no one else were to have any interest in God it would still be my duty, my honour, my privilege, my joy to sing His praise. But there is a sense in which individual, scattered worshippers cannot do justice to this greatest of all Beings. His greatness far surpasses the honour that any individual can show Him. In fact, the Bible presents heaven as a place where everyone - human beings, angelic beings - are so taken up with the goodness of God that their joy overflows in spontaneous praise and worship and the very material substance of existence shines and resonates with the vibrations of divine blessedness.

365 days without anything like this in our nation.

Can you see why it disturbs me? This God and His goodness are so little known that few people even notice that His worship has been ‘switched off’. People do not know that this is a duty of obedience they owe to their Creator. They do not know that it is an honour and a delight. The Christian teacher John Piper says that “Evangelism exists because worship doesn’t” - in other words, Christians tell people about God because they must worship Him but they cannot worship Him until they know Him. It is as though a spiritual black hole has formed over the land. The church is not being allowed to shine with the knowledge of God, like a bright star at the centre of the solar system. We are like scattered stars, singing praise to God like little pinpricks of bright worship against a backdrop of deadly dark spiritual blackness.

To me this is akin to a vision or a foretaste of hell. Hell, in the Bible, is a place filled with souls who spent their lives refusing God’s invitation to receive His goodness and respond with praise. It is not so much that the inhabitants do not know that God is infinitely good. It is that they were doubtful of His character and suspicious of His intentions and realised too late that He is as good as He claims and sincere in all His promises. Hell’s residents are eternally tormented by the fact that God’s goodness is now out of their reach forever. It is a place where people who would not praise God for His goodness, find that they cannot praise God for His goodness. It is a place where the sound of silence is agonisingly painful. It is a deep, terrifyingly anguished inability to sing for joy because there is no joy.

In spite of all I have said, I do not believe that breaking regulations and singing regardless, as some fanatics have done, is the right response. God is sovereign over this situation and He is speaking through it. It is time to listen to Him. We should not be silencing His voice with the noise of our songs. We should not close our ears to His providential discipline; He disciplines those He loves as His children. Put the therapeutic mindset aside for a moment and listen to the voice of fatherly correction.

For 365 days God has refused to allow people to offer sacrifices of public praise.

In the Old Testament when God refused to accept sacrifice it was because the sacrifice was offensive - either because the offering was deformed and second best, or because the people were not wholehearted in their worship. Have we been truly worshipping God when we go to church and sing, or were we just going through the motions? Have we missed singing this year because of how it impacts our sense of well-being or because it means God is not receiving His dues? Have we offered God our bodies as living-sacrifice in response to His great mercies or do we just offer Him one hour a week on a Sunday morning? Would it matter to you if the light of the knowledge of God and the sound of His praise were permanently removed from this land? These are the questions I am asking myself as, God-willing, Christians in Scotland return to gathered public worship next week (albeit in a restricted, socially-distanced manner).

Early this year I was struck by the words of Revelation 8:1. It is the one place in Scripture, I am aware of, where the praise of heaven is rendered temporarily silent. “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” The saints and angels are worshipping as Jesus Christ, the perfect sacrificial Lamb of God, is unrolling the scrolls of God’s providence in history. They delight in the fact that all the wars and famines and pandemics and so on are in the hands of one who gave up His life to rescue people from the deathly darkness of sin and put a new and living song of praise in their hearts. When the seventh scroll seal is opened the host of heaven are rendered breathlessly speechless. It is a time of silent awe in which the incense of human and angelic prayer rises in a quiet but steady stream up to God. Praise may have ceased but worship continues until, in the moment of God’s choosing, He acts again in mighty power to make Himself known in the world. Much of what John saw in his vision of the purposes of God remains shrouded in mystery. We do not know the future. But prayer rises like incense continuously to the God who holds the future. If we heed the voice of God’s fatherly discipline, turn from our sins and add our pleas for mercy to that heavenward stream, who knows whether this time of silence may be the prelude to Him doing something remarkable in our eyes.