Dear Pastor: Sing something old

You were expecting the opposite instruction? Hang on, we'll get there...

So far it's all been about the act of singing as a congregation. In theory I could go on for a long time just on that subject, but that would be wrong. The church isn't a glee club, nor a community chorus. Your congregation could sing for three-fourths of the service, but if all they're singing is mindless dreck it's probably doing more damage than good. So at some point we have to talk about what we sing, because it does matter.

Rather than get super-prescriptive about things, I'm giong to throw a handful (less a thumb, possibly) of basic ideas out there, starting with the one above:

Sing something old.

Quick clarification: "old" here does not mean "from about your grandfather or great-grandfather's time." I'm not talking about the nineteenth century, no matter how much some of your congregation might be set off at a half-moment's notice about "the good old songs" and how nothing has ever been that good.

Reach back further.  You can go back as far as the eighteenth century, the likes of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. You can go back even further, to hymns and songs of the Reformation. And you can even go back farther than that.

Part of my Sunday is planning for the next Sunday. Looking through the scriptures for that week, I'm choosing or writing prayers, and also looking for hymns. Based on how next week's scriptures and what's currently in my mind look, one of the hymns that came up is a relatively simple one called "Lord Jesus, Think on Me." After some deliberation it made the cut. Then I looked again. The tune is old enough, a sixteenth-century English psalm tune. The text, or at least the originial version of it? By one Synesius of Cyrene, fifth (yes, fifth) century.

Seriously, isn't that cool? C'mon, that's cool.

Never mind all the paraphrases and reworkings of scripture that show up in the church's collection of song. We have and can sing, whether to old tune or new, hymns created by our ancestors -- way, way back ancestors -- in the faith, and not just the ones with their names in the old Bibles on the shelf. Don't tell me that's not at least a little bit cool.

Now your average hymnal is not going to be full of fifth-century devotional texts, but it does draw from a rather impressive chunk of the life span of Christianity. Think about the prayers that speak of the church "in every time and place"; well, at least some of that "every time" of the church is found amongst the hymn repertory of the church. They still speak.

Two caveats, delivered in reversible form:

1. Not everything that is old should be sung. (There's old dreck as much as there's new dreck, and there are things that worked then that just do not work anymore. Do discernment.)
2. Not everything that is sung should be old. (That comes later.)

The idea is not to gorge on the "ancient" part of Hymns Ancient and Modern; the idea is to sing at least some part of our history. The idea is to remind ourselves that we are not creating all things new; we are inheritors of a theology and a worship that has changed unbelievably over the millenia, but of which some parts have lasted and persisted in such a way that we can still hear it, be taught and challenged by it and, in that instant of communion with the Church Ancient, get just a tiny bit plugged in to that "great cloud of witnesses" from the Hebrews letter/sermon.

And frankly, the church needs that sometimes. We are not the generation that is so damned clever that we are going to get everything right that all the other generations of the church failed to do. And if we really think that forsaking all that has come before is how we make ourselves "real" Christians, I have a precise theological term for you:

Bullshit.

Remaining aloof and utterly separated from the church and its heritage, messy and ugly and grotesque as it has often been, is no way to do better. It's just a way to do it all over again, only with more destructive weapons.

So sing something old, sometimes. Not necessarily every time (at least not millenia old). But sometimes. Don't be a separatist. Sing, sing with those ancients, and remember who we are, and where we've come from.