The Good News of God is Meant to Be Sung (Zephaniah 3:14-20)
The Good News of God is Meant to Be Sung
Trinity Episcopal Church
Holy Saturday Easter Vigil
April 4, 2026
Zephaniah 3:14-20
By: Pastor Mike Conner
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I have two kids, ages 5 and 3, at home, and they have this quirky bedtime habit of asking me or my wife for a story and then, after the story is finished, asking for what they call“the song of the story.” I’m not sure how this got started, but basically what they want is for us to take the story we just told them and retell it by setting the words to an improvised melody. Mostly I think they’re trying to delay bedtime, and yet, there’s a kernel of wisdom in their request. For as long as there have been humans telling stories, there have been humans singing songs, often singing the stories as the primary means of telling them. We learn our letters, numbers, colors, days of the week, and animals through song. In seminary, I memorized the Greek and Hebrew alphabets and the many different forms of verbs by setting them to simple tunes. Our hymns embed theology and biblical narrative in our hearts more effectively than even the best sermons.
God’s good news is meant to be sung. When God’s grace touches our lives, one of the most natural things we can do is to sing about it: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:21). With tambourine in hand, this is how Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, gave glory to the God who had freed her people from slavery.
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” sang the young unwed Mary when Elizabeth affirmed the presence of God in her womb. And after that holy child was born, the angelic army filled the skies above Bethlehem with song: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom God’s favor rests.”
God’s good news is meant to be sung.
If we were to survey all the songs drawn from the human heart by the love and power of God, we would have to speak of Deborah’s praise of Ja’el, and the theological poetry of the Philippian hymn and the Johannine prologue, and the heavenly ecstasies of John the Revelator’s angels, martyrs, and strange creatures. We couldn’t leave out Zechariah’s Benedictus or Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis or the songs that shook the very foundations of Paul and Timothy’s Philippian prison cell.
The good news of God is meant to be sung.
Oh, there are the Psalms, chanted by Jews and Christians for thousands of years. There are the Eucharistic liturgies, the Gregorian chants, and the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, and Handel. There are the African American spirituals, those freedom songs by which the Nobodies of the world were uplifted as Somebodies to God. And yes, if I may, we couldn’t forget that great poet from our shared tradition, Charles Wesley, whose many hymns include “Come, thou long expected Jesus,” and “Hark! the herald angels sing,” and even tomorrow morning’s “Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!” And just as there are rests in every piece of music, so even our sacred silences and contemplations have their place in our love song to God.
In every age and culture, in every language and artistic form, the good news of God is meant to be sung.
Zephaniah’s prophecy brought this home to me. Not much is known about him. The Bible says he prophesied during the reign of Josiah of Judah in the 7th century before Christ. Zephaniah’s three chapters of doom, which end with this sudden, stunning passage of joy, seem to fit the religious renewal and political reforms accomplished by Josiah when he came of age. Yet some scholars think these prophecies reflect, instead, Israel’s painful exile in Babylon, and the joy of their return. Others doubt Zephaniah ever existed at all.
What matters to me tonight is not historical exactitude but rather Zephaniah’s response to the movement of God—even if that movement was yet to come, experienced now only as a promise. “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion,” he urges. “Shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” (3:14). In a single verse we have four imperatives all basically saying the same thing: that God’s good news is meant to be sung. Singing is way to thank and tell the story of a God who removes our fear and our shame, who gathers in the outcasts and saves those who cannot save themselves.
But then, in verse 17, something unexpected happens. Zephaniah’s message shifts from what we do in response to God to what God does in response to us. The prophet says, “[God] will rejoice over you with gladness; [God] will renew you in [God’s] love; [God] will exult over you with loud singing!” And then the speech shifts into the first person, and we hear a stanza of God’s own love song for us.
Wait, God singing about us? To us? Over us?
What a mystery that we would bring such joy to our Creator!
And yet this is the good news of our faith, that through God’s faithfulness to the covenant, and through Christ’s death and resurrection, we have been made children of God, and who doesn’t love singing lullabies, happy birthdays, and loves songs to their children? Perhaps all our songs are reflections of, or small distillations of, God’s eternal song. Perhaps when we sing God’s good news we are participating in God’s song that is always already flowing through us. After all, to be inspired means to be filled with breath, and we have in our lungs the breath of the God whose word, whose melody, to us is love.
As John Wesley once wrote in an early Methodist hymnbook: “See that you join with the congregation [to sing] as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find a blessing… Sing lustily and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength ...Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing.”
The good news of God is meant to be sung.
Thanks be to God. Amen.