I suspect you will find (among pastors generally, or among particular congregations) those who will rejoice greatly in singing the oldest song of the church, as well as those who complain bitterly about it.
Similarly, there will be some who complain and some who celebrate singingnew hymns and songs, even the newest.
There will also be advocates and opponents of singing songs from the global church.
It is harder to find, most likely, advocates for singing hymns or songs that are “blue,” and quite easy to find those who object to it.
This is not a reference to anything profane or vulgar, of course, but speaks of singing songs and hymns that are "blue" in the sense that we speak of a particular genre of music as “the blues.” The church needs to sing songs that contain an element of lament or sorrow.
The sound of faces scrunching up in disgust is palpable: "I don't go to church to be sad." "I thought Jesus was supposed to make everything better." “Church is supposed to be an escape from that.” (I have actually heard that last claim.)
Here's the thing, though; the most prominent and widely cited biblical warrant we have for singing together as God's people contains plenty of lament. I speak, of course, of the Psalms, sometimes known (exaggeratedly, but not too much) as "the Bible's songbook."
Even Protestant reformers who were leery of congregational singing (for example, John Calvin) found the Psalms an acceptable outlet for congregations to sing. And the Psalms, as you might know, contain plenty of lament. Some of them are heavy with grief, and some of them are even more angry than lamenting.
Consider, for example, Psalm 137.
You might recognize this psalm by its opening verse; "By the rivers of Babylon -- there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion." The tone is set, and it doesn't let up, unlike many lament psalms that include brief interludes of praise, or at least attempted praise as a conclusion to the psalm. This one starts dark and turns darker.
The first six verses of the psalm are fairly familiar. The lament at being mocked with the request to “sing one of the songs of Zion!” (verse 3) by their captors and tormentors cuts deeply, and the emotional avowal not to forget Jerusalem – “let my right hand wither!” in verse 5 – is both emotionally wrenching and poetically exquisite in its expressiveness.
Things go much bleaker from there, though. In the final three verses of the psalm the emotional tone plunges into full-fledged cry for vengeance. In case you have forgotten those verses, or have somehow managed to avoid them, here is a reminder:
7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jersualem’s fall,
how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!’
8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!
This shocking passage begins relatably enough. The tone of lament present in the first six verses of the psalm grows more intense and is attached to a specific event, the destruction of Jerusalem. The new element here is the naming of a specific enemy, the Edomites, and the request that God hold that destruction against them.
It is in verses eight and nine that the psalm “goes dark” in a way most of us simply cannot contemplate in an act of meditation or even worship. Babylon, the “devastator,” becomes the focus of anger again, and the screaming yearning for revenge erupts into a vicious curse against them, invoking the brutal destruction of “your little ones” as the psalm rages to a close.
That is a dark, violent image, and many congregations are possibly unaware that the passage and its violent imagery actually exist in scripture. For those occasions when this psalm appears in the lectionary, for example, pastors might well shorten the psalm, only including the first six verses – the much more familiar and less violent portion of the psalm. Similarly, many settings and paraphrases of the psalm for congregational singing do not include the final three verses in their paraphrase or setting.
The collection Psalms For All Seasons: A Complete Psalter for Worship, living up to its title claim, does include settings of Psalm 137, both settings for chanting or reciting and settings for strophic hymn singing. The chant settings do include the full psalm. One such setting is accompanied by a psalm prayer, the final verses of which seem to address the rage found in those final three verses:
When loss and grief rob us of song,
may we entrust our hurts and hatreds to you,
the true and final judge of all. Amen.1
Here is one possible way of including the full psalm in worship without leaving its seemingly unspeakable conclusion dangling in midair, without comment or interpretation.
Of the versified paraphrases of the psalm included in the collection, two of them do not include the final three verses in paraphrase. The third, however, does address the verses, albeit in paraphrased commentary rather than exact reproduction:
God of memory, I remember children tumbling, not in play.
I will not forget the longing to strike back in that same way.2
Richard Leach’s hymn does in fact cover the whole psalm, and while not directly quoting the challenging verses, the setting does capture and confront the singer with the desire for vengeance found in the psalm. The singer or congregation is thus confronted with the stark realization of the anger found in the psalm and the even more stark possibility that we, too, could feel such anger in such a setting.
It is not necessarily the purpose of this discussion to recommend going quite as dark as those last three verses of the psalm, but it is clear here that the psalmists recognized lament and sorrow – and even anger – to be as much a subject of song in worship, as much a care to be brought before the Lord, as our praise or our petitions. For that matter, scripture more generally is not averse to lamentations, not with a whole book by that very name included in Hebrew Scripture.
Where this gets tricky, though, is in the practical challenge presented here, one even I cannot do much about. There really are not many such hymns out there these days. Aside from psalm settings, one could say there are extremely few lament hymns.
That hasn't always been the case. I was at a Sacred Harp sing a few years ago, and perusing the printed collection (and a few of those chosen for singing) I was reminded that lament was very much a part of the songs created in the shape-note tradition. They sing about suffering, they sing about dying, they sing about parting. They sing songs of weeping and mourning. Alongside songs that look towards hope beyond the grave are songs in which death, for example, has a hard finality to it, such as the song “Thou Art Passing Away” found in the 1854 Southern Harmony and Musical Companion3:
Thou art passing away, thou art passing away,
Thy life has been brief as a midsummer day;
Thy forehead is pale, and thy pulses are low,
And thy once blooming cheek wears the ominous glow.
Thou art passing away from the beautiful earth,
Thy much lov’d abode and the land of thy birth;
From its forests and fields – from its murmuring rills,
From its beautiful plains and its herbage-crown’d hills.
…
The light of thy bounty has faded and gone,
For the withering chlls have already come on;
Thy charms have departed – thy glory is fled;
And thou soon will be liad in the house of the dead.
This medically observant hymn contains a full seven stanzas of like tone, of which these are the first, second, and fifth. These constitute a small but non-negligible portion of the hymns in such books as Southern Harmony, Sacred Harp, orMissouri Harmonythat were popular in the nineteenth century.
Of course, death and illness were inescapable companions for many in that era, in a way that modern Christians simply do not experience them. This distancing from death and illness undoubtedly fits hand in glove with the distance the church is prone to keep from grieving and lament in worship; which is the hand and which is the glove is a question worth considering. Still, many of our ancestors in the faith faced death and illness more frequently and more directly in lifetimes marked by struggle and hard toil.
Mainline moderns are not accustomed to that. Beyond our medical advances and avoidance techniques, we also have our reputation for excessive moderation (yes, that phrasing was deliberate), and while that mostly gets blamed for keeping out more exuberant songs, it also reins in our singing experience in the opposite extreme.
How to bridge the gap? A hymnal that includes a psalter (a collection of psalm settings) is a start, as at least some of the lament psalms are going to be included. A very few hymns that provide for lament for specific conditions have made their way into newer hymnals like Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal (and that collection does come in an ecumenical version that does not have the word "Presbyterian" in the title). But the repertoire of lament hymns is not large.
Still, it matters to make some space for singing lament for a similar reason that it matters to welcome songs of the global church: it becomes a means of including. Inevitably somebody in your congregation is going to be in a condition of sorrow. Maybe it may be a short-term situation or a more ongoing condition. They are there, in your congregation. Is there any part of the service, any service of worship, which gives voice to their sorrow and encourages them to lift that sorrow up to God? (One might be tempted to mention intercessory prayers, but those are often targeted towards those specifically suffering physical illness, which is not always the case for those in need of lament.)
So I am asking you (and asking myself: see below) to do something that is not merely emotionally or intellectually hard to do, it's practically difficult to carry out as well. But there is a place for it, not every hymn (again those reversible caveats apply--not everything that is sung should be "blue," not everything that is "blue" should be sung), but some space for worshipers to lift up their grief not merely in a formal, constrained space of public prayer, but in the viscerally physical act of singing, and singing together.
Maybe this is a call for new hymns. Maybe I am unwittingly calling for radical change in how we think about worship. Either way, all those Delta bluesman were not wrong; sometimes you gotta sing the blues, even (or especially) to God.
If indeed I am asking myself to take up this challenge, I can say that I have done what I can in at least one way, one that adds to the repertory of lament hymns. Below is a text I wrote in spring 2019 in anticipation of major surgery:
With our earthly bodies broken,
While our hopes fade into fear,
Bodies failing or cut open,
Fates we never want to hear:
Where is Christ, the Great Physician?
Where is Jesus’ healing touch?
Dare we question why this torment,
Why we suffer pain so much?
Have we sinned somehow, unwitting?
Have we failed to honor you?
Is there some great deed of service
That we somehow failed to do?
Though your words refute such wond’ring,
Make it clear that’s not your way,
Still we cannot help but question
When there’s nothing left to say.
Still you promise not to leave us,
Though our doubting is not stayed.
You have claimed us in your kingdom,
Though our fears are strong arrayed.
Should we fail yet to recover,
If our wounds can never heal,
Let us not despair of knowing
That your care for us is real.
I make no claims for this as a perfect or ideal hymn of lament, but I can vouch for its directness and honesty, even after having come through the surgery and recovering more effectively than I might have hoped. The grieving is still real.
So yes, absolutely yes, sing something old, and sing something new, and sing something borrowed, and sing something blue -- something that lifts up our sorrows as well as our joys. Do not be a separatist, confining and shutting out the voice of the sorrowing. Sing with all of God's children, even those whose voices are more likely to cry than sing, and remember who we are and whose we are, and that sometime the one in need of a song of lament will be you.
1Paul Detterman, Psalm prayer for Psalm 137, in Psalms for All Seasons: A Complete Psalter for Worship (Grand Rapids: Faith Alive, 2012), 896.
2Richard Leach, “God of Memory,” 1994 (Copyright 1996, Selah Publishing Company), as included in Psalms for All Seasons, 900.
3William Walker, Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, ed. Glenn C. Wilcox (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1987), 329.
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