“Hark the Glad Sound!”
Advent Hymn Story
Frederick Niedner, Chapel of the Resurrection, 29 November 2011
Lesson: Isaiah 61:1-3
The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
This lesson is the scripture text that inspired the hymn we’ll sing in a few moments, “Hark the
Glad Sound,” in LSB (#349). You might also recognize this as the text for a sermon Jesus once
preached in the synagogue at Nazareth, his hometown. Luke’s gospel reports that the sermon nearly
got Jesus killed, since he allowed as how God meant this good news for everyone, all the world’s
oppressed folks, not just those in and around Nazareth and the homeland (Luke 4:16-30).
So far as I know, Philip Doddridge didn’t get into any trouble back in 1735 when he wrote this
hymn for use in the church he pastored. But he knew a thing or two about being in trouble, or close
to it. For one thing, Doddridge was a member of the so-called “Dissenting Church” in England, that
is, the folks who had been tossed out of the Church of England a couple generations earlier for
dissenting when the king had imposed the Book of Common Prayer and all its teachings upon the
church.
They were a curious lot, these Dissenters, a bit like Lutherans, except that they did their music
much differently. Because they rejected the Book of Common Prayer, they had no hymnals, so
pastors wrote their own hymns and led them line by line from the pulpit, as the congregation
repeated them in “call and response” fashion. Although he only lived to the age of 48, Philip
Doddridge wrote some 400 hymns for his congregation, and never intended any of them to be sung
or used elsewhere. But a few got saved, and we still sing this one every Advent.
Doddridge was a brilliant fellow, the 20th and last child born to an oil and pickle dealer and his
wife. He was thought to have been still-born, and his tiny, blue body was set aside for burial, but as
the midwife tended to the exhausted, grieving mother, she noticed a slight movement and soon got
the lifeless child to coughing and crying, and eventually he learned to sing. . .all the way through
the early deaths of his parents and the childhood he spent in what we call foster homes.
I can’t tell you whether or how this hymn inspired the members of Doddridge’s congregation,
but I can tell you that his hymns were not popular with a more famous hymn-writer of that day,
Isaac Watts, whose hymns abound in our hymnals. I can also report that something else Doddridge
wrote, a book called The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, was read half a century later by
a British politician named William Wilberforce, who credited Doddridge’s work with his own
conversion to Christianity. And Wilberforce, you may know, was the leader of the group that
eventually succeeded in outlawing the British Empire’s practice of slavery and slave-trading in
1807.
If only that old prophet who wrote six centuries before Christ could have known all that would
become of his poem about preaching freedom to captives. Indeed, we may wonder what even Jesus
imagined would come of his words as he preached that text in Nazareth, or what Doddridge,
inspired by both Isaiah and Jesus, thought his hymn might accomplish.
When our hearts are broken and darkness swallows our days, we want the heavens ripped open.
We want lightning strikes, earthquakes, and loud noise. But most of the time, when the heavens
tear, we hear music and verse, songs of God’s dreams and God’s own tears and the good news that
carries Hosanna-singing oppressed folks all the way to Jerusalem. . .and beyond. You never know
what will come of teaching folks to sing hymns of faith.
2