Homily: What Do We Hear?

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

August 30, 2026

Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:15-20

 

What Do We Hear?

 

The fifth Sunday of a month is often observed here as a "hymn sing Sunday." It doesn't always work out - the next fifth Sunday will be in November but we'll be busy with the first Sunday of Advent that day - but frequently such a Sunday gets loaded up with several extra hymns, a little differently each time depending on the pastor or musical leadership trying to put it together.

In this case that format is being modified slightly; change an 's' to an 'r' and you've got a "hymn ring Sunday," which seems about as good a description of the day as we're going to come up with. Indeed, while such parts of the service as the prelude and introit are not necessarily hymn-based, you will notice that there are three distinct portions of the service given over to hymns arranged for and played by bell choir (with a couple for us to sing as well).

I invite you, as we go through this service, to pay attention to what these arrangements of generally well-known hymns have to say to you in this particular presentation. Do you find the words matching themselves to the tune in your head? Is there some deep past association with the hymn coming into your memory?

The psalm verses heading each set nudge us toward what the hymns in each set have in common; songs of comfort and reassurance in the first set (including in that second setting the hymn with probably the most gutting origin story of any hymn I know); the forthcoming set reminding us of what might be called "the basics" of faith; and the final set offering up praise and glory to God. Of course, there are many other ways that hymns can function in the life of the church; there are hymns that teach, hymns that grieve outright without words of reassurance, hymns that relay scripture to us, hymns that mark occasions or events in the Christian faith and life, hymns that keep us on the right path (which might be the point of that reading from Ephesians), and many more.

While I do want to mark the hymn settings on this particular day, I cannot let the moment pass without also commending those pieces we have heard that do not have familiar hymns or words attached to them. Hymn arrangements can be comfortable and easy to listen to, but the music with no words attached can play a unique function in worship; if we are willing to open up and listen to those "songs without words," we may just be able to hear nothing less than the Holy Spirit speaking, or maybe singing, to us in those musical moments. Can we allow ourselves to tune in to such a moving of the Spirit?

As for the rest of this service - and it is a service of worship indeed, perhaps delivered through an unusual medium - let each setting to come speak each its own message, to its own text, to the things that the music conveys itself, maybe even those "sighs too deep for words" that came up in Romans a few weeks ago. Hear, and be led by the Spirit.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (actually sung, from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #839, Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine; #641, When In Our Music God Is Glorified

Sermon: The Work of Refining

First Presbyterian Church

December 8, 2021, Advent 2C

Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 1:68-79; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

 

 

The Work of Refining

 

This Christmas finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities. And yet, my friends, the Christmas hope for peace and goodwill can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don’t have goodwill toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by our misuse of our own instruments and our own power.

 

 

These are the opening words of a sermon preached by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the Christmas season of 1967. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that they have every bit as much relevance now as then; if anything, the “paralyzing fears” are perhaps more intense and more present than ever. War has not gone away; violent attacks across the world jolt our sense of security; even the most sober-minded and emotionally restrained individual has to consider the possibility that, no matter where they go, a mass shooting could break out. No, we are not at peace, within nor without.

If we turn to the scriptures seeking consolation, today’s offerings are a mixed bag. The reading from Philippians, one of Paul’s more effusive and loving greetings found at the beginning of his letters, seems a cheery prospect, as Paul rejoices in the Philippians, giving thanks for them, saying he “always prays with joy” for them, expressing confidence that “he who began a good work among you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus,” and so forth. It does, though, take a slightly less joyful turn by its end, when Paul expresses the hope that “you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ,” which carries the implication that something will put that purity and blamelessness to the test.  

The other readings offered for the day put that difficulty, or at least potential difficulty, more in the foreground. The gospel reading for today from Luke 3 features John the Baptist beginning his work of stirring up trouble, while citing the words of Isaiah about one crying in the wilderness and rough places being cleared out. On one level, such a word - "the crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all people will see God's salvation" sound hopeful enough, but there's a lot of demanding work to be done before that happens. 

The morning’s canticle offered in the place of the psalm, from Luke 1, takes us back to John’s father, Zechariah, and his prophetic exaltation upon John’s birth. The story of Zechariah and Elizabeth is a heck of a story itself, as two senior citizens are jolted out of their comfortable if lonely lives by the announcement of a son to be born to them. When Zechariah’s doubts come tumbling out of his mouth in unguarded fashion, he is struck mute by the heralding angel, his tongue to be released only upon his son’s birth and naming. 

The words Zechariah utters are words of rejoicing, yes, but that rejoicing in the gloriousness of God and celebrating of the newly-born child is underscored with danger. God has been required (yet again) to redeem his people, to save them from enemies and those who hate them; the newly born son John will be called upon to give light to"those living in darkness and in the shadow of death.” This newly-born herald of the Messiah is not being born into a peaceful and calm world, and the word John will be charged to bring (as we see in Luke 3) will not be an easy word to bear.

And then, there is this passage from Malachi. Yikes.

It sounds promising at first. The messenger will come (we Christians have tended to interpret this a prophecy of John the Baptist), and then the Lord will come to his temple. Indeed, the one “whom you deaire” is coming! Joyful stuff indeed, and entirely suitable to our celebratory impulses as the day of Christmas approaches.

But then, the ominous question: “But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?”

This passage makes up one of the familiar early sequences of the oratorio Messiah, by George Frideric Handel, that is often heard from large choirs this time of year. Handel, of course, is working from a different translation so the text will be different, but he clearly gets the difficulty and portent of this passage – [sing] “But who may abide the day of his coming, and shall stand when he appeareth?” Not a song of comfort.

It’s as if Malachi has taken the encouragement of the first verses and turned it on his head. The one in whom we delight is coming … and we cannot possibly endure it? 

Novelist and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner got at something like this in his book The Alphabet of Grace, writing about doubt:

Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine, self-authenticating religious experience would be. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.

 

We have, in modern Christianity and particularly in modern American Christianity, become rather saturated with the notion that Jesus is our buddy, our best friend, maybe even our boyfriend in some settings. The ancients would have been utterly baffled by this idea. For all that Jesus undoes our understanding of God by coming down to walk among us in human form, what does not change is that God is a mighty God, powerful, fearsome, even terrible. To be before the face of such a God was not, in the mind of the ancients, something a human could expect to withstand without being fearfully and terribly changed by the experience, even in the face of a God who is also loving and merciful and compassionate. The love and mercy do not erase the fearfulness and terribleness. 

What comes next is also a challenge: (from the Common English Bible)

He is like the refiner's fire or the cleaner's soap. He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver. He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. They will belong to the Lord, presenting a righteous offering.

 

Being refined by fire and purified by the harshest soap there is, again, seems in discord with the Lord in whom we delight appearing in his temple, and certainly seems at odds with the shepherds and angels and Baby Jesus and all we associate with Christmas.

And what does all that have to do with peace?

Perhaps it has to do with the things that prevent peace.

We know we are not at peace. We know ourselves, when we’re honest to be fallen, to be corrupted, even if we don’t use the theological language. We know ourselves to be sinful. And that sin, no matter how great or small, leaves us unable to know genuine peace.

We cannot stand before God in that state. But who may abide the day of his coming?

But we are not destroyed, Frederick Buechner’s concern notwithstanding. The Lord is like a refiner’s fire. A metal like silver, or gold, was in those times purified by fire. The silver or gold was changed, but it was not destroyed. The corruptions and impurities were removed, purged away by the fire. The worst stains were purged away by fuller’s soap. As in the reading from Philippians, we are made ready to be "pure and blameless" after all.

So it is with us, in the day of the Lord. 

If we truly seek the child of the manger, we cannot avoid the purifying and refining God. As much as it seems a paradox, it is all part of the same package. The terrible and fearsome purging away of our fallenness and corruption is that end to which the babe of Bethlehem takes us, even if we dare not contemplate it. And this is our deliverance, this is our hope, and yes, this is our peace, even amidst the refiner’s fire.

For the refiner’s fire and the fuller’s soap, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #666, O Splendor of God's Glory Bright; #109, Blest Be the God of Israel; #---, The Lord began a work in John; #106, Prepare the Way, O Zion 

What (or who) am I not listening to?

After that last post on "what am I listening to", I have been reminded this week of the opposite extreme in my listening practices. There is in fact one musical category I have been deliberately avoiding, for a full year in fact. I could not have gotten away with such avoidance in my previous career, especially for this past year, but in my current life it was relatively easy to do.

Yep, I'm one of those people who has been avoiding, deliberately, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. 

Specifically, avoiding Beethoven's music during the year leading up to the 250th anniversary of his birth, which you might have heard was yesterday. 

It should be noted that this is actually one thing that was enabled by the ongoing curtailment of activities due to the pandemic. Last week or last month or some time I'd likely have been compelled to attend a big choral concert of one of his larger works, because my wife would have been singing in it. So, a narrow miss there.

Yes, it was a deliberate choice. Yes, it was somewhat encouraged by the anniversary. No, I'm not the only person. 

Why?

Because there was no need for music organizations to spend the last year or the next year bingeing on Beethoven music.

Why? Because music organizations, for the most part, already spend a great deal of their time and energy bingeing on Beethoven music.

This is especially true of instrumental groups, symphonies most of all. But choral groups will jump in on a Ninth Symphony whenever possible, and in a year like this other works were going to get a workout. But on the instrumental side, it's a pretty strong likelihood that any orchestra that put forth a Beethoven cycle (or had planned to) for last season or this had already done a Beethoven cycle (or some limited form thereof) some time in the past decade. Aside from certain specialty organizations, it's hard to imagine such a group going a full season without a Beethoven something. (And in the interest of full disclosure, I did participate in the Beethovenism, to the degree that one of my few public recitals was devoted to LvB's string trios, even though I was no Beethoven scholar.)

Perhaps even more pervasive is the presence of Beethoven music on such classical radio as exists these days. I'm not going to spend a full twenty-four hour period listening to a classical radio outlet (I need sleep), but it's hard to imagine such an outlet going a full twenty-four hours with no Ludwig. There may be a handful of others who get such treatment (Mozart or Bach might come to mind), but not many. 

The one exception I have made in the past twelve months is to let pass the fleeting bars of "Für Elise" that Schroeder tries to pass as "Beethoven Christmas music" in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even that example points to the depth of the phenomenon. Mozart or Bach never got that pop-culture kind of treatment, nor others. (To be fair, Schroeder doesn't use his Beethoven fanaticism to demean the music of other composers, as the strip below shows.)

Interestingly, many of the names on that list Lucy spits out spent much of their careers laboring under the shadow of Beethoven, whether self-imposed or as part of a musical establishment in which LvB was increasingly idolized (I use that word more literally than I usually do on a non-religious subject). 

So, for me as a no-longer-music-professional, I simply didn't see any reason to support the Beethoven Binge with such funds as I had at my disposal. 

But not listening to Beethoven wasn't enough; something else needed to fill the musical void.

I ended up, as slightly alluded in the previous post, finding out just how much I had underappreciated Franz Schubert.

I rekindled my affection for the composers of late-19th and early-20th century composers of the US who had been my principal scholarly pursuit back in academia. 

I happily indulged in music of composers such as Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, William Levi Dawson (and I'm not referring to his choral arrangements of spirituals), William Grant Still, and others who committed the unforgivable crime of composing while Black. 

I remembered how much I liked jazz. I actually went to some jazz shows, both local and more national, before the pandemic shut down most concert life, and picked up some online shows in the meantime. 

I also put out feelers into other musical genres I hadn't indulged in much in a while. I ended up picking up some Broadway I wasn't familiar with and trying to find some of the classical music of India that had fleetingly passed through my life at least two decades ago.

And I discovered I liked hearing those things. 

So, with the term of avoidance technically over as of yesterday's big anniversary blowouts (such as they were), I have to admit that I honestly don't know whether that avoidance will continue or be dropped. 

I'm still obsessing over those Schubert piano sonatas. Still absorbed by that Chrismas Cantata by Daniel Pinkham. The presence of what might be called "classical Chrismas music" on one outlet I have available is helping pass the time. I still am waiting for Margaret Bonds to get the public recovery that Florence Price has been getting. (Listen to this and this if you wonder why.)

And one other thing: I'm not sure that "greatness" is enough of a reason to be force-fed one guy's music to the inevitable exclusion of some other composer's work. Call me a heretic if you like. It wouldn't be my first time.

So I have no idea what I'll do the next time LvB pops up in front of me anywhere other than from Schroeder's piano. Eventually I might spend some time with it. But I'm in no hurry. There's a lot of other stuff I need to hear.

??? Who knows what I'll do...

What am I listening to?

 The title question popped up on Facebook a couple of days ago (I think?), from a colleague/friend asking what music others were listening to right now. I did not answer at the moment, being a bit busy and distracted (my default state these days). When I had a moment to stop and check myself I didn't answer either. I still haven't, mostly because when I finally put my finger on the music that was most occupying my ears and my mind right now, neither of them seemed to be a "jam," and the question did ask what was one's "current jam." Making a currant jelly joke seemed a reach, so I left it.

In fact there are two things that have been lodging themselves on my sonic devices in particular - one which has been occupying my mind for quite a while, and the other coming to the fore more recently, apparently tied to the advent of the Advent/Christmas cycle now upon the church. 

When last I darkened the door of this blog I confessed to an ongoing obsession with the late piano sonatas of Franz Schubert. At that time his penultimate sonata, no. 20, was foremost in my ear and mind. Since then my listening has broadened...all the way to his last sonata, no. 21. In particular the second movement has taken hold. (Fair warning: this movement itself is about ten minutes long, although obviously I consider such minutes to be well spent.)

You will note that this movement ...  is ... slow. Now this is not itself so odd; your average Classic/Romantic era piano sonata has a slow movement. What's odd here is that in this particular case, the first movement of Schubert's sonata is also rather slow, and two slow movements back-to-back is less typical.

Also, this movement is not only slow, it is quite spare, for lack of a better word. Aside from the slightly faster and somewhat fuller middle section, this movement is joltingly spacious in its texture. Rather than being spun out in a line (a not-atypical way to talk about musical melodies or motives), these notes and figures seem almost suspended in empty space. Laden with the burden of pandemic time, it almost sounds as if the notes are socially distanced.

Even when things seem to get busier, the musical activity often consists of repeated notes or figures, which manages to sound busy without necessarily sounding full, at least as Schubert deploys them. And even then, after what passes for great agitation in this movement, the music ultimately returns to the arrestingly spare sonic space of the first section, with slight tweaks of harmony and rhythm,  the emptiness of notes and motifs hanging from gently swaying mobiles in a darkened room. It is not the sound of silence - that is Simon & Garfunkel's territory - but perhaps it is the sound of quiet - quiet in the way Frederick Buechner describes a room where people are not speaking; the room is darkened, perhaps, but not empty. 

I hesitate to guess why this movement has latched on to me of late. Maybe in the deafening emptiness of pandemic-tide the genuine quiet of the movement provides sanctuary. Maybe I'm just really geeked by Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of the sonata. Maybe it's just the pleasure of ten minutes that invite me not to be overwhelmed or ragged or confronted with the endless rounds of I don't know how to do this that constitute so many of my days in this time. Or maybe it simply invites me in the direction of mystery, and some part of me that is normally shouted down and drowned out sneaks into my consciousness through it.

The second, more recent, more seasonal, and shorter fascination of late is a more modern composition, by an American named Daniel Pinkham. It is the second movement of his Christmas Cantata, a setting of the ancient text "O magnum mysterium." You might notice some similarities to the sonata movement among the obvious differences. 

I have had the intense pleasure of singing this work a couple of times. "Spare" and "spacious" are fitting adjectives here also, and the hints of medievalism add to the effect. This is a movement to tax the breath control of the finest choral singers and brass players, and the sheer length of notes makes more space rather than filling it. 

The effect is, to be sure, deepened by those initial words of the text - O magnum mysterium, "o great mystery." The hearer is led directly into that contemplation, in this case the mystery of the Nativity and Incarnation. The mystery does not avoid the seemingly ludicrous; barn animals the first witnesses of the infant Messiah. There is a thickening of the music as the Blessed Virgin gets her shout-out, a build to a volume climax spiced with discordant intervals and the long sustained notes underneath it all interrupted for a fraction of a moment, and yet at the last it all collapses in slow motion back into the space, the quiet, repeated motifs from the brass and organ strung together and fading away, to one last unresolving chord. 

It is a text for the Nativity, but musically it is all Advent - waiting, quiet, unbearable anticipation. It is much shorter than the Schubert sonata movement, but it is still music that demands time. Somehow, I guess this is something I need in some way or other. 

Anyway, that's what I'm listening to.

Wordlessness, mystery, and Schubert piano sonatas

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort, … than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer. If we choose to seek the silence of the holy place, or to open ourselves to its seeking, I think there is no surer way than by keeping silent.

--Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. 

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

--Aldous Huxley, "The Rest is Silence"

People often complain that music is too ambiguous; that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with individual words. These, too,, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite...

If you ask me what I ws thinking of when I wrote it [one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words"], I would say: Just the song as it stands. And if I happen to have had certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to different people. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling which is not expressed, however, by the same words.

--Felix Mendelssohn, letter to Marc-André Souchay, 1842

I am, dear reader, about to engage in what does seem an extraordinarly ironic effort: I (a pastor whose business involves a lot of words) am going to write a lot of words to encourage you to be...less bound by words.

This particular Lent has probably been the most challenging I've known in many, many years, as I suspect it might have been for some of you too. It was a little less than a year ago that I underwent that major surgery thing, one which is now inescapable in its consequences for my daily life even as I am expected to be more or less "back to normal" (a word I refuse to use for my life anymore; the closest I will come is "routine," in that sometimes my life might be close to having one). Things started off well enough, and I even got to enjoy some beach time and a spring training ballgame, and then of course the world went splat and we all had to go home. More and more we seem to live in a place that simply cannot take care of itself or be trusted to do the right thing for the great majority of people, and that's a wrenching place to be. 

Not shockingly, I turned to music. But it turned out that not just any music was going to work this time.

Normally this time of year I'd have been listening to all the Lenten music I've got - passions and other oratorios, Liszt's Via Crucis, MacMillan's Seven Last Words (and any other composers I could have gotten hold of), anything with a Lenten or especially Holy Week theme that I could load onto my computer (and then download onto a flash drive for driving listening, with my car no longer having a CD player). That project kept not happening, and then was scuttled for good. What ended up getting so recorded instead, for reasons I'm not even sure I fathomed at the time, was a whole bunch of music by Franz Schubert. Not the songs (or Lieder) for which he was most famous, but instrumental music - symphonies, violin sonatas, and especially piano music, including several piano sonatas.

The latter are, for the uninitiated, (usually) larger-scale works for the instrument, consisting of three or four movements most often. Neither Schubert nor the piano sonata as a genre was ever a particular subject of study for me during my academic years, so it's not as if it was a matter of returning to old favorites (as it is when I pull out the music of George Whitefield Chadwick, my dissertation subject). In fact, for a long time pretty much all I knew of those works was that a main melody from one of the late sonatas got appropriated and reworked into the main theme of the extremely average 90s sitcom Wings. Music scholarship pushed me into other musical directions, so that middling familiarity never germinated into anything in particular; it was classical radio programming and broadcasting that finally allowed me to hear the full sonata (Piano Sonata in A, D.959 - it deserves much better than that pop-culture affiliation). 

So, I listened to those piano sonatas. I listened on the way to and from Vero Beach some; I listened around town; and especially when we became homebound by Covid-19, I listened. It became, out of no particular identifiable impulse, my Lenten discipline. 

It took me a while to figure out why this happened. As the coronavirus situation disintegrated and epidemic was plowed over by pandemic, we were all inundated with instructions about what to do; washing hands and using hand sanitizer when washing had to wait (I finished off a small bottle of the stuff that I had had since I moved here), then the particular instructions for social distancing (keeping my distance from people in crowds is a thing I consider a specialty, so...), and finally the call for full-fledged isolation once the NBA broke down and major sports, theme parks and other entertainment edifices began to close. As church gatherings became prime opportunities for spreading the virus, the instructions continued, under the guise of "support" - how to put your service online, the various technologies available to do so (all hail the great god Zoom, at least until "Zoom-bombing" became a thing), and the various imperatives about what worship looks like in a time of isolation. Again, it took time for me to realize consciously what my subconscious evidently grasped very quickly: I needed a place to get away from the Hell (and I use that word most theologically) of words.

Frederick Buechner, quoted above about the need to shut off the chatter, was no word-hater, clearly - he has written a ton of them in his career, and has also had things to say about the power of words that themselves are among the most powerful words I know. Nonetheless I was forced to be reminded again by him that words are sometimes oppressors, and I needed a place to flee from them for a while. It is a strange thing to find myself in agreement with Aldous Huxley, but his appreciation of music (often snipped and turned into overly cute inspirational memes that would no doubt make Huxley gag) became my quest. Silence is impossible these days? Let the music drive out the noise. 

And, pace Mendelssohn, the music needed for the moment was music not bound by words. Not that Mendelssohn was devoid of song with words - he wrote plenty, not to mention two whole oratorios and other choral works, not to mention instrumental works with words attached, so to speak - his three main non-choral symphonies, after all, have descriptive titles: "Italian," "Scottish," and "Reformation," the latter of which quotes the melody of Luther's great Reformation hymn "A mighty fortress is our God," making it inseparable from words even further. No, what was needed here was that could only mean, as Mendelssohn put it in writing to his wife's cousin, "just the song as it stands." Not that there was no meaning at all - far from it - but the meaning was not going to be bound by words, not going to be reducible to words. 

Schubert's piano sonatas, it turns out, are pretty good vehicles for such un-worded listening. Unlike, say, certain Beethoven piano sonatas ("Moonlight," "Pathetique," "Appassionata"), most of Schubert's big works in the genre have no descriptive titles attached. In addition, they're quite "roomy" works. This does mean, among other things, that they're long, but it isn't length itself that makes for "roominess." Here further elucidation from Huxley helps. In the same essay as above he also writes: 

Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking.

(So no, I'm not really a Wagnerian.)

The Schubert sonatas (again, especially the late ones) are pocked with silences - frequently unexpected and unprepared, and all the more arresting for their surprise upon the listener. At the same time, the sonatas are also frequently "roomy" in their measured pace; tempos might be fast or slow, but no idea is cut short or deprived of its opportunity to be heard and received and reflected upon in a measured and fuller way than, say, even some of Huxley's favored Beethoven. For music that is present, music that allows the mind or soul to be invited instead of merely demanded, it works pretty well. It does not submit to our words, no, but allows us to be drawn along instead of pounding the soul into submission. For this moment, it was (dare I say literally?) a godsend.

As this progress continued, I began to wonder where this particular bit of ... reflection? meditation? contemplation? might fit into my increasingly desperate quest for spiritual preservation (I dare not be so optimistic as to hope for spiritual "growth" in all of this, just let me survive...). In trying to look around ... I wasn't encouraged. Let's be honest; virtually all of the modes of meditation or contemplation or reflection or what have you in the Christian tradition (where I live) are pretty word-based. As for Buechner's declaration above, true silence is pretty elusive in the Christian tradition. And when such silence is in fact desired or explored or achieved, the end result pretty much turns out to be ... words.

So I wonder: is it possible that music - wordless music - might be an aid towards a form of silence, at least? Is it possibly, pace Buechner, an aid in clearing away the verbal clutter that so often and easily overwhelms our minds or souls, that tells us our feelings or emotions or spiritual yearnings are not "real" unless we can put them into words? (Never mind the Spirit's interceding for us with "sighs too deep for words" in Romans 8:26...) Might that things that, after silence according to Huxley, best expresses the inexpressible be a means towards finding some space for silence in our harried spirits? Might "just the song as it stands" (or the piano sonata, or the symphony, or whatever we can find - I have to believe there are options outside the Euro classical tradition for such un-worded listening but I claim no expertise to say) be a means to work towards mystery?

To me, that's where this becomes a thing I'm still grappling with. We stink at mystery. We have frankly turned the word into a literary genre about following clues and solving puzzles to catch criminals, so to speak, and lost the concept of mystery - that which lives outside of us, that which does not submit to our glib explanations and easy conceptualizations, that which is larger than us (and boy, do we hate to admit anything is larger than us!) and not controllable by us.

I have realized, I guess, that I am woefully ill-equipped to deal with mystery, and (distant enough from my scholarly past, I guess) am looking at musical experience as maybe, possibly, a portal into at least some form of spiritual mystery (as opposed to mysticism, I think). We end up suffering, I fear, when we cannot cope with mystery and the unknowable (trying to grapple with the unknowable was damn near killing me for a stretch over the past few years), and at least for the moment this kind of listening is helping me in a different way than I have known before.

So that has been this Lent's discipline, so to speak. I don't think this is one I can immediately give up or walk away from. Maybe I can listen to something besides Schubert, though. But I have to hope there is hope, or refuge, or I don't know what in the simple yet maddeningly difficult act of listening to music, unfettered by words, not seeking to describe or understand or analyze or break down or anything but listening, experiencing, maybe even feeling. At any rate, I have to keep going, I think.

Yep, pretty sure this would make Huxley gag.

Hymnody held hostage!!! (or, the perils of popularity)

So an article came across my news feed sometime in the past week I suppose, on a subject I'd so much prefer to avoid talking about mostly because my body is still easily subject to nausea after that surgery five months ago today. Still, I gagged my way through enough of it that it did get me to thinking about one of the challenges of singing "something new" in worship, having to do with the sources of our "new" songs for worship.

As described in this strangely unthoughtful article, performers of great popularity in the realm of music known as...is it Christian contemporary music? Contemporary Christian music? I honestly have no idea, it's been decades since I paid attention. Anyway, whatever it's called, some CNN type somehow decided it would make a good article to wonder why such performers didn't have something to say, to their audiences or in their songs or whatever, about the current occupant of the White House and his, shall we say, controversial nature. Apparently the occasion of the Dove Awards, the Grammys of the Christian music world (I guess that's still what they say?), provoked the thought somehow.

As I've indicated, it's a strange article, not least because it somehow fails to consider the possibility that such performers don't criticize that person because they like and support that person. It does happen, particularly among Christians, and especially particularly among certain categories of Christians (though such support is pretty broad). The performers in question are pretty good at mouthing biblical-sounding platitudes sans context to justify their silence, so there is nothing particularly informative about the article in the end except that large-scale national media continues to have less-than-zero clue of how to report on religion.

Still, though, the article does, in a sideways fashion, set me to thinking about the very different business of planning and preparing music for congregations to sing. (Note: I am not particularly interested in parsing the relationship between that music genre and congregational singing at this point; my interest is particularly not in offering particular critiques of musical styles per se, except so far as the theological content songs of whatever style may or may not offer. So, no comment there. As for CCM, whichever order the C's go, it's not a genre I follow these days. I'm mostly listening to jazz.)

The essential thesis of the article seems to be that such performers avoid comment in their songs because they don't want to lose their audience. Apparently such audiences are regarded as pretty controlling and quick to take vengeance on those who stray from the "true faith," which I guess is defined as whatever they think? There is in that fear, though, a lesson for the mainline pastor whose challenge is to select and prepare hymns and songs that, like the scriptures themselves and the prayers we pray, encompass a full and representative range of the the human response to God.

Given that need, there is a clear and present danger in being trapped in an extreme reliance on one particular style or another of songs for the church to the degree that particular styles tend to associate exclusviely or nearly so with particular theological postures. And no, dear pastor, I'm not going to name names. The theological discernment is your job, just as it is with scripture and prayer and liturgy and confession.

That said, I'm not above being unable to make the leap to use particular hymns, until it becomes impossible to avoid doing so. It's pretty much impossible to avoid singing "Seek ye first" (one of my least favorite bits of religious song ever) when your sermon is on the very scripture passage quoted in the song. The one hymn I can think of that I simply cannot bring myself to choose at this point in whatever ministry I have is, in fact, in a musical style that I find at least kind of interesting.

I can't bring myself to use "For everyone born," Glory to God #769, in worship. Musically it is an interesting or at least distinctive song, with a slow and even subdued tune marked by sometimes challenging syncopations and off-beats, that gains a bit more energy and uplift at the refrain. The music might be challenging to get some congregations to sing, but I can't get around the fourth stanza. To put it bluntly, I can't ask an abuse victim to be at table with her/his abuser. Leaving aside any theological questions or arguments, as pastoral care goes it feels like (swear word alert!) shit. Maybe my mind will change in the future, but as of right now I can't use that hymn no matter how popular it is. (And no, I'm not really looking to get into any arguments on the subject.) I have thankfully never been a victim of abuse, and I don't even want to come close to presuming what victims of abuse should have to go through in worship.

On the other end of the spectrum, the desire to curry the congregation's favor does put you, dear pastor, at risk of a kind of theological imprisonment. Not all musical styles are necessarily locked into particular theological topics or modes, but some are, and if you can't stray from that style when the need for a lament or something else arises, you've got a problem (this one I have seen from experience, though thankfully I wasn't the one in charge).

Musical choices have consequences, and sometimes those aren't always clear or expected. My only recommendation to you, dear pastor, is to keep your theological-discernment hat on at all times, and never let it be knocked off by a gust of popularity. You will likely have plenty of opportunities to "play favorites" in your church, but those can't stand in the way of being able to sing a hard word when it is necessary to face painful realities or hard truths.

As much as you cannot avoid hard scriptures at times, you're going to need the hard songs to go with them.

Lament is just one possible hard choice one might need to make...

New music in the church, or "newmusic"?

OK, working on getting back on track here after, what, a month and a half?...

One of my many previous jobs in my life was as a classical radio announcer. After a year or two working the Saturday afternoon pre- and post-opera broadcast shift, I actually got to move into the weekday morning slot, at the point the principal live local broadcast at this particular public radio station attached to FSU, where I was doing my graduate work. It was actually a pretty good situation for me; It got me up early and thinking about music for three hours, after which I went home and wrote on my dissertation. In truth, if it had been possible to make a living doing that, whether there or elsewhere, my life might have taken a completely different path. I think I was pretty decent at it.

Beyond the straightforward playing of classical music (mostly from CDs at that time with some LPs), my job also included the occasional live on-air interview, mostly with local musicians but occasionally pre-recorded interviews with more national or even international figures (I think the conductor Robert Shaw, who regularly came to Tallahassee for performances with the local community chorus, and the violinist Gil Shaham was probably the most famous musician I interviewed).

One interview I remember at least for a particular moment was with one of the associate deans at FSU at the time, who also worked on the annual festival of new music at the school. Now for those who are not terribly familiar with the classical music world, it helps to know at this point that when it comes to a very large part of the classical music spectrum, the church can look like a radical avant-garde movement by comparison. For an awful lot of listeners and not a small number of performers, even with only three letters, "new" is a four-letter word. Playing particularly avant-garde works on the air simply didn't happen, because the powers that were didn't want to put up with the virulent and potentially violent blowback that would result.

The task in this case became to convince listeners that a new music concert didn't necessarily mean a barrage of atonal fright sounds. I remember floundering around for a bit before finally putting the question forward for the associate dean to answer: "OK, is this concert about new music or (air quotes only visible in the studio, dramatic vocal register change, words run together) newmusic?"

There can be similar reaction to the introduction of a new hymn or song in worship, at least in some cases. Here, though, the discussion is complicated by the division of labor in congregational singing. Remember, the technical meaning of the term "hymn" encompasses the text being sung, with the music to which it is being sung being identified as the "hymn tune." While songs in more contemporary genres of church music tend to be more fixedly associated in tune and text, hymns have the inherent possibility of being sung with more than one hymn tune. Admittedly no one is ever likely to set the tune NEW BRITAIN, the one most commonly assocaited with "Amazing grace," to any other text, it could be done. Many writers of new hymns take advantage of this by writing new hymns that can be sung with already-familiar tunes. Not being a composer by any means, I am among this number when I engage in hymn writing. It's not that I have any problem with a tunesmith creating a new melody for anything I write, but I can't do it myself and attaching a familiar tune makes the hymn more accessible more quickly.

At any rate, a good marriage of a new hymn to a familiar tune can ease a lot of the apprehension about singing something new. In a sense, the new text is eased into the minds and mouths of the congregation by the tune.

Still, the advancing of new tunes as well as new texts needs to be a part of a congregation's worshiping life as well. There is too much risk of stagnation without some infusion of new musical life. Furthermore, God did not quit inspiring composers after 1900. God gives creativity as a gift to many different kinds of artists, and those who choose to use that God-given creativity to compose new music for the church should not be met with indifference and point-blank rejection.

Furthermore, a church that can only repeat and parrot words (or tunes, for that matter) decades or centuries old is dying. There it is. Ancient truths speak in new words and sing in new tunes, presenting to every generation in words and music that arrest the attention and provoke the soul to new heights of praise and new depths of understanding. Cutting itself off from that is just a good way for the church to go stale and lifeless.

Make use of your instrumentalists, dear preacher, in first of all determining the singability of a new tune for your congregation, and of all your musicians in teaching the tune to the congregation. Give it time to be heard and let the congregation join in as ready, at least the first time a new song is introduced. These are fairly basic steps that help take away the fear of the new, or at least calm it just a little.

But singing something new - not everything, but something - is vital for the life, energy, imagination, and intelligence of the church. For goodness's sake, don't choke that off.

Mind you, in some styles new music is actually welcomed and craved...

Worship is a concerto (grosso), not a symphony?

I don't know for sure how old it is, but it's been out there for a while: the metaphor of worship as drama. There is some logic to it: a pastor or worship leader (or is it God) might be the director, and each has a part to play, etc. Except that if worship is a drama, who is the audience? Of course the answer is "God," in which case we are all the "actors" and ... it gets confusing.

Of course, there are other ways to think about worship and help it make sense to all who participate, some of which are better than others. Perhaps the key might be to understand the particular ideas about worship being communicated.

When it comes to the music of worship, it can be a little tricky. The musical life of a congregation may operate on many different levels even in the course of one worship period. The congregation may sing (good Lord, one hopes the congregation sings!), there may be a choir or other leading vocal body that sings separately at times, and one or more instrumentalists are likely involved as well, possibly together (if more than one) or maybe each separately.

But it's more complicated than that, even. The congregation is likely to be accompanied by one or more of those instrumentalists, as is the choir. One instrumentalist, depending on the instrument, may even be accompanied by another. So there are a lot of different possible levels going on in what is meant to be a unified whole of worship.

And all of this is made a little trickier by the theological hope that, no matter what variety of musicians may be involved in a given service, the most fundamental musical act of worship is that of the singing congregation. This is not to say that there is never a service in which a choir or other ensemble takes the lead (church choirs gonna cantata, apparently, even in the mainline), but it is to say that such services are exceptions and not the rule.

And of course, there is more than music going on in any given service. A pastor or layperson may lead in prayers or spoken responses, and (surprise!) there's usually a sermon as well. Looking at a service in which musical acts are blended in with spoken (and maybe other?) acts, the texture gets fairly complicated to capture.

As a metaphor for all this, drama certainly has some positive attributes, but it has a few weaknesses as well. The cast of your average drama may be quite large, and yet the action might well be confined to a few characters. We could reach back to good ol' Greek drama and bring up the idea of the chorus that comments on the action, but that doesn't quite work; we want the congregation to be doing the work of worship, not merely observing or commenting upon it.

I wonder if the historical world of music (my world, in many ways 😎) might offer a closer, if not so well-known metaphor or two.

Perhaps the most obvious model that might come up is the symphony. It involves a large body of musicians playing together, obviously, and that makes a fairly decent comparison to a congregation (leaving aside the issue of how large or small your congregation is). At one point I thought that would be the metaphor, but now I'm not as convinced. As noted above, worship frequently includes what might be thought of as "solo" parts, to a degree that most symphonies do not. (For the musically learned and persnickety: yes, I do know that symphonies can in fact have solo parts, and very important ones at that, like this. Chill.) Symphonies can have solo parts, but those solo parts are not characteristic of the symphony, as a rule.

Also, there's the troublesome question of who exactly is the conductor in this scenario. The quick and easy answer might seem to be "God," but if God is the audience for this music, that doesn't work. I don't think the pastor works well as conductor either; one of the soloists, to be sure, and maybe even the orchestrator depending on how services get planned in your church, but I don't think that "conductor" really works as well as it might seem to describe the pastor's role. If nothing else, the pastor seems (not literally of course) to be one of the musicians, if one who has a particularly tricky and fairly long (but not too long!) solo to play.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure there's an equivalent to the conductor. The choir director may literally conduct the choir, but is unlikely to lead any other part of the service. A lay liturgist may seem to lead much of the service, but is also likely to fade from prominence at some point; that, too, seems more of a soloist role.

At this time my best-suggestion metaphor for the church at worship is the concerto.

The concerto is also an orchestral or larger-ensemble work, but one that specifically includes a soloist or soloists. What the soloist or soloists do can be pretty elaborate (although they aren't required to be), as can be the case in certain parts of worship (and no, I'm not going to accept any claim that just anybody can get up and preach, or at least can't get up and preach well). Not everyone is particularly well-suited to read scripture aloud or lead in liturgical responses, and while everybody can sing (no matter what some jerk told them when they were younger), not everybody should sing in the choir. This holds true in much the same way that not everybody should be involved in cooking when it's time for the congregational dinner, or not everybody is well-suited to tend to the nursery. Different gifts are expressed in different roles, and all are needed.

In fact, I'll go even more specific (if perhaps a bit more obscure) and suggest that worship can be decently compared to a specific type of concerto, one known as a concerto grosso. This particular genre is found mostly in the so-called Baroque Era of the western classical music tradition, and specifically makes space for two or more soloists. Furthermore, it doesn't necessarily require a conductor, as seen in this video; a soloist or keyboardist (if there is one) might give occasional cues for the ensemble, or the ensemble may simply be so much attuned to one another and to the musical score that a conductor is not necessary (really, when thinking about a congregation, that'll preach!). And while the soloists certainly play important roles, the concerto grosso doesn't work at all without all of the members of the orchestra executing their parts.

(An aside: you'll notice that the ensemble in that second video is not very large. Just making an observation...go ahead and draw a conclusion from that...)

No analogy is ever going to be perfect, and there are certainly flaws with this one. For one thing, lots of people have no idea what a concerto grosso is. (If you mention Bach's Brandenburg Concertos to them, that might help for some.) But there's something to it. There are many voices, many parts that are necessary for worship to be carried out with both theological integrity (no accidental heresy, please) and a certain level of performative skill (dirty word, "performative," I know, but still needed). Whatever individual or "solo" moments may take place, worship doesn't work unless every member of the congregation plays her or his part.

Let the concerto be played.

Holy Communion...Blues?

First of all, go listen to this. Nothing about this post will makes sense without it. (Cue readers: "and that will be different how, exactly?"...)



You can see this little ten-minute piece is labeled "Holy Communion Blues." The recording was made in 1965 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, not in a studio (clearly). The cathedral had invited a relatively popular local jazz pianist to bring his trio in for a special service of Holy Communion, complete with hymns and choral selections for which the trio would provide musical support. Additionally the trio played instrumental selections for other parts of the service, as here, while communion was being served.

The musician in question was relatively well-known locally, but not necessarily outside the San Francisco area aside from one hit, "Cast Your Fate to the Wind," recorded in 1962 mostly to fill out an album of covers of tunes from the film Black Orpheus. A second album followed, in collaboration with a Brazilian guitarist, in which bossa nova and other Brazilian influences started to make their mark on his music. Enduring popularity, however, came later in 1965, when the trio provided music for a Christmas special featuring characters from the popular comic strip Peanuts. Vince Guaraldi provided some tunes for seventeen later Peanuts specials as well as the feature film A Boy Named Charlie Brown, as well as continuing a non-Peanuts musical career until his death in 1976 (having just completed the recording for It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown earlier that day).

The Grace Cathedral service included all the expected elements of a high communion service (presided by a bishop, no less), with a choir of both men and boys for responses and hymns. Guaraldi's trio gives admirable support to those portions of the service, by turns swinging and grooving with the hymn tunes and liturgical responses without dominating or "taking over" the proceedings. More than most other commercial jazz projects, this communion service remained a service of worship (despite the unfortunate album title The Grace Cathedral Concert appended decades later), even when Guaraldi's trio played two numbers on their own.

I do own this CD and wear it out frequently, and did so before getting into the ministry. Since then (and even a little bit before) my favorite track has always been the one linked above, "Holy Communion Blues." It has remained a favorite even as the title has grown more and more vexing.

Holy Communion...Blues?

I come of that modern school of sacraments in which the sentence "This is the joyful feast of the people of God" sets the tone, very near the beginning of the sacrament, whether actually spoken or not. I'm not of the school in which the Lord's Supper (and that's the only thing you can call it) is basically a memorial service for the crucified Jesus.

And yet, I'm constantly brought to a halt whenever I run into this piece again. I can only stop whatever I'm doing (with the exception of driving, I guess) and listen, and I cannot stop from wandering off into the whole idea of holy communion blues. Seriously, if I could afford a jazz trio, or even just a solo pianist to be at our church for just one communion Sunday just to play this, I could die a happy preacher.

Quite likely the naming of this movement was not at all so intentional, as far as I know. It was played during communion, it was slow and reflective - not a swing or a stomp or a jump - so blues it is. (If anyone has any evidence to the contrary I'd love to see it. I think I'd actually feel better.) Still, that name stuck in my head for reasons I couldn't make out. Why did that juxtaposition of words so stay with me? Why, besides the understated effectiveness of the music itself, did that stick in my mind so much?

I may understand it better now.

As I've gone through all the lead-up to that surgery, with the anger and and frustration and despair that came with it, and now as I'm coming out on the other side, with emotions tending more toward sadness and melancholy, it makes more sense. It might make even more sense than Guaraldi (or whoever came up with that title) ever intended.

Every act of Holy Communion, or Eucharist or Lord's Supper, has some blues involved. It comes to the table with us.

The blues may come in the form of a broken body. Maybe it has suffered irreparable injury from outside, or uncurable disease from within. It may suffer from disease or from a cure worse than the disease. It may be moving inexorably towards final collapse or may simply be saddled with a chronic, non-fatal but ongoing condition. (I am coming to know this last well.) But so many of us come to the table with a broken body.

The blues may come in the form of a troubled, self-sabotaging mind. You, dear pastor, might never spot these challenges in the pews until it's too late: the housewife's ongoing but well-hidden depression, the former football star's deteriorating brain, the respected businessman's raging addiction, the retired schoolteacher's battle with dementia. So many of us come to the table with a troubled, self-sabotaging mind.

The blues may come in the form of old, encrusted burdens of sin and rebellion yet to be cast away. The communion hymn names two of the seeming heroes of the New Testament, Peter and Paul, each each confessing their unworthiness to be at the table - Peter for his denial, Paul (as Saul) for his persecution of the church. And yet the Host bids them come. Who knows what other past malfeasance goes unknown, its bearer unable to know or receive or accept that forgiveness yet waiting? Surely the blues may come in the form of old, encrusted burdens.

The blues may come to the table in more ways than I can possibly hope to name here - loss, grief, sorrow may be set off by so many tragedies of life. And there they all are, waiting at the table.

In the heavy evangelical church in which I was raised, much was made of making yourself "worthy" before coming to the table, even warning that "he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation unto himself." (Yes, it was sounded in King James English, and yes, it always seemed to be males only who were at risk at this.) This was of course meant to root out some unconfessed sin in the communicant, maybe even with some sort of dramatic confession?

I suspect, though, that far more people fear themselves unworthy to come to the table for very different reasons, or perhaps simply afraid to come and to be seen in all their brokenness and sorrow. Even now I find myself wondering what bizarre sabotage my rerouted body will commit against me when I finally get behind the table for the first time post-surgery.

Thing is, though, we are all bringing some kind of blues with us. It's entirely possible the worst brokenness that comes to the table is the brokenness that has no clue how broken she or he is. But we're all broken in some way, and we're all called to that table anyway, and we're not somehow supposed to turn ourselves into superheroes by the time we get to the bread and the cup. That's not how it works. We don't turn ourselves into perfect little Christians to get ourselves invited to the table; we come, broken or grieving or troubled or afraid, and are welcomed and fed by the One who knows all those broken parts and sorrows and troubles and fears, as pathetic as they seem to us, and that One who calls us and feeds us calls us sister, brother, friend. And we come away from the table made whole - not that any one individual is "fixed," but that we are made whole - we are made one body, the Body of Christ, and we go out not as merely a bunch of broken bodies but as The Body.

And it would be a shame to miss that over cancer, or dementia, or trauma, or CTE, or depression, or even this weird thing in my abdomen.

Come to the table. Come singing whatever Holy Communion Blues weighs in your heart, but come. Christ bids you come, and the broken, fearful, troubled selves that make up the Body of Christ await your broken, fearful, troubled self.

Dear Pastor: Music is not magic

You've quite possibly heard or seen it before.

"If we just (implement x kind of music), we'll (get result y)."

Though it seems most often applied to the x and y "do praise and worship music" and "get young people in church", it really can apply across a wide array of musical styles, each of which has an audience, so to speak.

"Big classical choral music"? "People with money." (The public radio approach, you might say.)

"Good ol' gospel music"? "Real faithful Christian folk." (Judgmental much?)

You get the idea, and you can probably fill in the blanks yourself, no matter how broad or limited your musical experience. Whenever churches go looking for a magic elixir to "revitalize" or boost their numbers, music in worship seems to be a really popular place to start.

And on some level, it can work. A newly-instituted contemporary worship service can draw in some of the curious. A big fancy choir can get some onlookers. I don't know of any church that has decided to go whole hog on the gospel song approach out of the blue, but they might just poach a few old-timers from some churches if they did.

So yes, as the title of this article wants to suggest, contemporary Christian music (or gospel song or "traditional" hymnody, whatever that means) probably is bringing Christians together.

It (whichever style you name) is also driving Christians apart.

Note that I have not read and am not at all referring to the content of the article (I assume I'll get around to reading it eventually, but I'm pretty sure it won't be before Easter Sunday). Since the article is in Christianity Today I can safely that their audience is not my audience, or at least my target audience. But the title itself, as a new iteration of this familiar old refrain, is enough to provoke comment.

And that comment is one rooted in nothing more complicated than human nature. Some will glom onto the contemporary thing, others will run from it as fast as possible. And you can go down the line through whatever variety of congregational song you please, and you can get the same result.

There is reference here to a hoary old trope of music as somehow a great unifier. That itself is probably some variant of the even hoarier old trope of music as a "universal language." Do yourself a favor and spend some time with a broader variety of musics from around the world before ever uttering that line, please? For that matter, spend some time with, say, Hildegard of Bingen and Anton Webern and see if that "universal language" idea still makes sense to you. Folks who try to talk the "universal language" thing are probably not widely familiar with a lot of things, or are mostly interested in pushing a highly Westernized version of those musics (this happens a lot in popular music, in which Western - read 'American' - influence is almost impossible to escape).

One could argue that the same thing has been true in what might be called the "global song of the church" as well. Those in various "mission fields" were largely fed translated versions of American or European hymns as the stuff of their worship. It took quite a while to get away from that tendency and to see the growth of more indigenous musical expressions of faith and gospel begin to grow. Even so, any degree to which the "brings people together" argument for global church song might hold water is going to be largely a colonialist legacy as much as anything Christian.

The same is going to be true across other styles as well. The contemporary Christian impulse has a huge component of stylistic export involved, with the style being extremely American even if its biggest producers come out of Australia.

Disturbing colonialist legacies aside, it really never is the music itself that "brings people together." Music is not magic, as the title here suggests. The uniting or dividing is done by people, just as pretty much everything that happens in or to the church, for good or ill, is done by people. If some number of people choose to come to a church because of its musical performance style (and some number in turn choose to leave or stay away), it's the people doing the moving and choosing.

It would be far more accurate to say that in choosing a particular musical idiom for your congregation, you're also choosing a potential "target demographic" that you hope to bring in. If you end up drawing more baby boomers or GenXers than millennials with your contemporary service, which could easily happen, that's another issue, but the choice to plant one's flag in a particular musical category is also a choice about who you want in your church. Frankly, it should be openly acknowledged as such. You'll get exceptions to the rule for sure, but be clear about exactly what you're seeking with your church's musical choices.

This frankly is not even about declaring such choices right or wrong. You do you, dear pastor. But be honest with yourself about exactly what you're trying to do when you make one musical choice or another, and don't expect music to be a magic elixir that brings the entire world (no exceptions) under your roof.

But what about the people who didn't go to the concert?

My worship. MINE. (Another angle)

So it's been a little while since this post, in which the subject of a church offering multiple styles of worship service became a jumping-off point for thinking about the perception of worship as MINE (a la the Finding Nemo birds). There is another angle from which such a title invites reflection, one that touches both on a history of the hymnody sung in many of our churches and possibly certain current practices as well. In this case the problem at hand can be boiled down to three letters: "I," "we."

Worship is a corporate act: that is, the body of Christ is joined together to do worship. For all the folks who go on about how they "find God" in nature or music or whatever, that isn't worship, so let's not be confused here. The very point of worship, right down to the songs sung, is to join that body, that community together in praise of God, confession of sin, proclaiming and hearing the Word and responding to that Word, and being sent out from the gathering to do Christ's work in God's world. It's something we do.

Of course, there have been stretches of the history of the church where its hymnody and congregational song didn't always reflect this sense of the body gathered in worship. Take, for a few examples:

"Will there be any stars in my crown?"
"Face to face with Christ my Savior"
"On Jordan's stormy banks I stand"
"When the roll is called up yonder I'll be there"
"O that will be glory for me"
"When I can read my title clear"
"I am satisfied with Jesus"
"Make me a blessing" (Or, "Make me a channel of blessing" - both present)
"Must I go, and empty-handed"

You get the idea. This comes from the first hymnal of my childhood, a reasonably narrow range of that hymnal. There are, of course, other hymns directed at God without first-person singular or plural usage, and it should be noted that there are also hymns that do reflect a more corporate position ("We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves," "Light of the world, we hail thee," "O God, we pray for all mankind," "We've a story to tell," "We shall see the King someday," and of course "Shall we gather at the river" also appear.) But that's a lot of first-person singular.

And when that much first-person singular gets drilled into your head Sunday after Sunday, it makes a difference. Congregational song forms us, every bit as much as anything else we do in the church and maybe more given the insidious nature of music as what Frederick Buechner called a "subcutaneous" art, one that gets under your skin.

Now imagine such song getting under your skin for thirty or forty or fifty years.

If you want to talk about some of the things that challenge the church as it stands now, and the degree to which the "mine mine mine" mindset affects the church, this is a possible surreptitious culprit to think about. If we spoke before about the possessiveness that can form around a particular worship style or service, it's worth considering how much similar possessiveness can form around a particular church itself. Indeed, the two go hand in hand.

You end up with a church that gives off the vibe or mindset of "don't change anything as long as I'm alive." They can recognize that something's not right, can see that what used to work great doesn't work so well, what used to pack them in now pushes them away, and so forth and so on, but still "don't change anything as long as I'm alive." It's almost become a part of that church's DNA. That particular body both functions as a collection of individuals and as an "individual" fearful of anything that might disrupt each comfort zone. And all the individualized congregational songs, if we take the whole idea of music and its influence seriously, have to have had an effect on that church's (or that collection of individuals') mindset.

[Note: you will possibly remember that I am not of mainline origins, so my experience - you might think - is not relevant. True, I am not of mainline origins; however, you'd be surprised how much churches that get counted as "mainline" now have rather substantial histories of much more "evangelical" approaches to worship, especially to congregational song. Maybe not in downtown Philadelphia, but, across (ahem) certain regions of the country, ... we'll just say that Southern Baptists and Presbyterians didn't necessarily sound all that different when it came time to sing.]

Now, here's the question: how much of that "I-me-mine" mode of thought still exists in congregational song? Others will have to tell me how much of that characterizes "contemporary" worship. Most hymnody that has come out of the mainline has gotten better at emphasizing the "we"-ness of worship, and other sources such as the Iona community are pretty good at keeping song corporate. (Still, some newer hymns do slip into the individual - "O Christ, surround me," Glory to God 543, comes to mind.)

But it's a thing to be aware of. Are we forming the body of Christ, everyone all together? Are we singing "we" when it's necessary to sing a first-person pronoun? There is some - some - space for congregational songs from an individual position, but it shouldn't be the bulk of the repertoire. A church full of Finding Nemo birds doesn't end up being a church with much future.