Simple Gifts -- December, 2015 Pastor Musings

One of my favorite American composers is Aaron Copland. Several of Copland’s more famous pieces involve settings of Joseph Brackett’s dance tune Simple Gifts. Copland uses it without words in the ballet Appalachian Spring but also arranges it for voices.  Brackett’s poetry is elegant in its simplicity: 

'

Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,

To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come 'round right.

Because it is a dance tune we might think that “to turn” means dancing. Maybe. But is it possible that Brackett isn’t driving at the idea of delightfully turning our lives around so that everything comes out right. Brackett was highly religious, and his point could have been deeper, more complex, and spiritual beyond the simple message. To turn, in the Hebrew Bible, is to change the direction of our lives. Wouldn’t it be logical that if we “turn” we come around to what is “right?”  So, what is right? 

Red-letter words in Matthew 6: 33 (KJV) say for us to “…seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” There is simplicity to that. 

I write this article standing on the eve of Advent. By the time they are published, we will have celebrated our first Advent Service. It is so easy at this time of year with all the tugs and pulls of the world, of family, of church needs, of work demands, to forget the simple message of Advent: preparing ourselves for the coming of the Christ in our world. This great displacement of God coming to walk among us in human form is so simple that we try to make complex. The simple is that God loves us, enough to take on human, vulnerable, form. Some may want to take that simple message and make it complex, but the simplicity is John 3:16 “for God so loved the world.” Luther suggested that was  “the gospel in a sentence.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote: “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." Most of the time Holmes is right, but on this maybe not. 

Advent is simple: Prepare ourselves for the coming of God into the world; and one way to prepare is by seeking first what it means to live in eager anticipation and readiness of that already-but-not-yet kingdom of God.  But in seeking first, we are required to turn from the world’s ways and thoughts and refocus ourselves on ‘bowing and bending’ our will to God’s. We want to make it complex. But at the end of the day, it is really a pretty simple question: are we ready to seek first God’s kingdom, rather than the world’s? 

Selah, Pastor Dennis