"On High May Dwell With Thee"

The Church's One Foundation is one of the great hymns of the church. It celebrates the church as the community that Jesus created, whose members include the living and the dead, that finds its sustenance in one source, that survives struggles and contentions, and that is focused on one great hope. The hymn reaches its triumphant climax in the last verse (which is actually a combination of the best parts of the original last two verses):

Yet she on earth hath union, with God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won.
Oh happy ones and holy! Lord, give us grace that we,
Like them, the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with thee.

The triumph, thus is the restoration of the communion between God and humans that was God's original intention, that, as the story of the Garden of Eden indicates, humans lost by their rebellion, and that Jesus came to restore. The hymn contains overtones of the prophetic call for a just community, of Jesus' special attention to the meek and lowly rather than the rich and powerful, and, above all, of the promise at the end of Revelation of a perfect city in which all nations live in harmony with each other and where the dwelling place of God is with humans. The hymn sums up that promised community at the very end, in the hope that we "on high may dwell with thee."

Yet for reasons that I do not understand, the current Presbyterian Hymnal has replaced that essential phrase with the words "may live eternally," which changes the focus from the restoration of community with God and turns it into the hope of individuals to live beyond their individual deaths. Unlike other modifications in the Hymnal, that change is not necessary to avoid gender-specific or archaic language. The change is not simply unnecessary, it alters the entire focus of the hymn for the worse. In light of traditional teachings about Hell (a subject that seems to have disappeared entirely from our thought--but that's another topic), I'm not sure why eternal life out of communion with God is necessarily a good thing. More significantly, the change seems to reflect the narrow individualism that sees the sole purpose of the church as the salvation of souls and that denies any social dimension to the Christian message. As I well remember, many of those who opposed the church's involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s argued that collective action to resist injustice was unChristian. Rather, they said the only way to change society was to save enough souls, and that would, somehow, automatically lead to the destruction of unjust institutions and ways of living. So far as I could see, either at the time or in retrospect, the main purpose of that argument was to allow people to remain comfortable while they continued to receive the benefits of injustice.

In contrast to this narrow focus, of course, is the prophetic tradition of a just society, which was at the heart of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, concept of the Beloved Community of love and justice, a community that went far beyond simple racial equality to full love and reconciliation among all peoples. Our Confession of 1967 is based on similar concepts. And, despite some of our more individualistic myths, those concepts have also played a major role in the best portions of American history.

Yet today we seem as a nation to be losing this sense of community. It appears that those in their late teens and twenties have little sense of empathy with others and little or no understanding that they are part of a community all of whose members are related to one another:

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/the-me-generation/

At the same time, the so-called "Tea Party" movement seems to be based on a myth of the sovereign individual who has no need of government or other community institutions:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/

The most important thing that we can do as a church may be to maintain our hope for God's desired community and thereby to help our society to regain the common purpose that it seems to have lost. We can express that goal by ignoring the change that the Hymnal made in this great hymn; let us sing our hope that ultimately we "on high may dwell with thee."