Hymn of Promise

Scripture — 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50 (NRSV)

Someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Devotion

What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

In 1952, a gifted 22-year-old pianist named Natalie Allyn Wakeley married an aspiring Methodist clergyman in his early thirties named Ronald Eugene Sleeth, who had just completed his PhD. Like so many other young pious couples of their era, they appeared set for a career of quiet pastoring (him) and gracious hosting and piano-playing for church (her). (One thing that struck me while looking into this story was how much it reminded me of my own parents, also a pianist and a Methodist clergyman, who met and married a short decade later.) And indeed, he did pastor, and indeed, she did make music. But their ministry was a great deal more multifaceted than anyone had expected at the outset.

Ronald Sleeth had (as far as I can tell) gotten his Ph.D. to enable him to serve the church in the academy, and he spent most of the rest of his life as a homiletics professor—except for the single year he spent as president of his collegiate alma mater, West Virginia Wesleyan College (1976-1977); a historian describing this moment remarked diplomatically, “His true heart and gifts did not lie in administration.”

While Dr. Sleeth was professor-ing, Mrs. Sleeth did more than stay in the background; she took composition and theory courses at Southern Methodist University in the late 1960s while her husband was teaching at Perkins School of Theology, and she published her first piece of choral music in 1969. And then, over the next few decades, she became one of the most acclaimed church music composers of the late twentieth century, writing over 180 works.

In early 1985, a dinner guest at the Sleeth house happened to mention T. S. Eliot’s line “In our end is our beginning,” and it sparked inspiration for Natalie, who quickly wrote and published a choral anthem titled “Hymn of Promise” based on the idea. She wrote her own text for the piece (except for the line she gently lifted from Eliot), and it spoke of life, death, and resurrection, using a very similar metaphor to the one Paul uses here in 1 Corinthians 15. “In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an apple tree,” it began.

You plant stuff and it looks like it’s dead, but it’s not (say both St. Paul and Natalie). Instead, it bursts into glorious growth: “In the cold and snow of winter there’s a spring that waits to be, / unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.” That’s even the case when what you are planting is people who have died in the hope of Christ: “In our death, a resurrection; at the last, a victory / Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”

Only a few short weeks after Natalie wrote this piece—which, thanks to its later incorporation as a hymn in the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal and in many other hymnals, would become the most famous and beloved thing she ever wrote—Ronald was diagnosed with cancer; he died in April 1985. He requested “Hymn of Promise” at his funeral. Natalie died of cancer herself seven years later in 1992. She was only 61.

What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.

The Sleeths are gone, and my parents are gone, and my uncle, and then so many people who left us during the pandemic, and so many other losses that I do not know of but that each of you cherishes in your heart. We cherish them there in the hope that Paul’s words to the Corinthians are true, that we will all someday bear the image of the man of heaven, that at last—as Natalie told us—there will be a victory; something that right now only God alone can see, but that one day, God willing, we shall see too.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Our Work Is Not in Vain (1 Corinthians 15:58).