Sermon: Making the Most of the Time

First Presbyterian Church

August 18, 2024, Pentecost 12B

Ephesians 5:15-20

 

 

Making the Most of the Time

 

 

I believe it is time for a deep, dark confession.

I have been drunk in my lifetime. Twice.

I did the deed on two consecutive Friday nights more than forty years ago, during my first semester away from home, at the noted hotbed of decadence known as Wake Forest University, where I spent my first year and a half of college. A girl I had gotten really interested in chose the rich sophomore from an important family over the poor freshman nobody from way out of state, and I took it hard. Being “set free” from my teetotaler religious upbringing (and not having fully realized just how much I had been damaged by my own father’s alcoholism), I reacted the way I figured I was supposed to do. Even in this, I was still a bit cautious: I chose two Fridays when any potential hangover wouldn’t affect any marching band responsibilities the next day. I found the parties where I could do it, and I did it.

I hated it. Hated every second of it.

I hated the beer itself (it was cheap stuff). I hated the noise. I hated the dim lights at the party. I especially hated, after the second time, waking up in a place I didn’t recognize.

         But most of all, I hated the dissipation, the dysfunction.

I hated my body not doing what I was trying to do. I hated my brain not working right. I despised it all, and so I never did it again. These days I’m on enough medications that don’t work well with alcohol that I can’t drink, period, but even before that it was something that really didn’t appeal to me, ever since that night, and I’ve never done anything that put me at all within range of being drunk.

You can guess which part of the scripture for today brought on this memory. Rather like last week’s seemingly out-of-nowhere injunction against stealing, here our author drops in a seeming non sequitur about drunkenness in the midst of the lesson. In this case, the “don’t do this” part of the exhortation is followed by the “do this” answer “instead, be filled with the Spirit.” 

This isn’t the first time Ephesians has touched on the imagery of “being filled.” Way back in 1:23 is the indirect suggestion of being filled with Christ; 3:19 speaks of being filled “to the measure of all the fullness of God”; and 4:10 returns to Christ, the one who ascended and descended “in order to fill the whole universe.” With today’s passage about being filled with the Spirit, we have completed the Trinity of filling. 

This is what is to be preferred to being drunk on wine, which the author calls “debauchery” as the NIV and others translate it. Greek words, like our own English words, are sometimes capable of a range of meanings, and the word so translated here is one of those. I am struck by one of those alternate translations here, namely the word “dissipation.” There’s a different force to this word, one that goes beyond the mere moral corruption of “debauchery” to suggest the dysfunction and lack of control and even erosion of self that tends to accompany drunkenness (the part I so hated forty-some years ago). 

And this leads us to why this seeming diversion actually fits extremely well into this short bit of exhortation. We began this passage with the encouragement to “be very careful, then, how you live, - not as unwise but as wise.” Again, shades of meaning matter here; the point isn’t to encourage fear and trembling, but to encourage us to live deliberately, precisely, to be diligent about how we live, to pay close and careful attention to our lives and what we do with them. We live with care and precision. We are attentive to how we proceed in life in all ways. Dissipation completely cuts against that.

This is a matter not merely of our own personal life, but that life as it is lived among others, perhaps especially among the church. To borrow a phrase from Richard Carlson of Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, PA, “wise living is personal but never private.” It is precisely not for the sake of our own private privilege that we are precise or deliberate or careful about our lives; it is the opposite. Carlson continues: 

“Living wisely, especially as it entails discerning the will of Christ, means active engagement and involvement in all of life’s circumstances so that the reality of our new self is continually manifested in and through the light of our new conduct “at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:20).”[1]

 

That last phrase jumps ahead to the end of this passage, but I want to catch one vitally important phrase back in v. 16. The whole business about living carefully or diligently or precisely, as wise and not unwise, points to the phrase “making the most of every opportunity," or "making the most of the time" as the NRSV and other translations render it Now that sounds like something we modern types can relate to, right? Living in a world that’s all about being “efficient” with our time? Or that encouragement to “work smarter, not harder”? We who live in the age of “efficiency experts” are certainly all about being able to respond to this exhortation, right?

Martin Luther once offered this observation on how busy he was: “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” The importance or urgency of the tasks before Luther did not deter him from spending the most necessary time of all, time in prayer. One can also remember Jesus’s own proclivity to disappear into the hills to pray, even when the crowds following him were at their most urgent and demanding. 

“Making the most of the time” doesn’t happen without a part, and not a small part, of that time devoted to prayer, to discernment, to listening for God. How else are we to live “not as unwise but as wise”? How else can we possibly “understand what the Lord's will is”? How else can we possibly hope to be “filled with the Spirit”? 

Going on, what are we doing when we are “speaking to one another with psalms and hymns and songs” among ourselves, when we "sing and make music" from our hearts to the Lord? What are we speaking to one another in those psalms and hymns and spiritual songs if it is not some kind of prayer itself, or at least rooted in or formed by or inspired by prayer?

The last verse seems to make it all explicit as it speaks of “always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” While it makes a good stirring finish to the last really encouraging portion of this letter, it also offers another instruction that can leave us shaking our heads and saying “wait, what?” Giving thanks for everything? Reading a book like this in the broader context of scripture remains a necessary and important discipline.

So at this close of the practical moral instruction section of this letter, we are left with the call to seek God’s wisdom, make the most of the time we are given, and to do so in prayer and song, as much as possible. We’ve learned in recent years, for example, that there are times not to sing to each other, or at least not to do so in close quarters. Still, the instruction in living wisely and in prayer holds and matters. And we don’t do it to help us to make the most of the time; it is in doing so that we are making the most of the time. And that’s how the Spirit is then able to lead us. That’s how we are able at all to be filled with the Spirit, with the fullness of Christ, with the fullness of God. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #308, O God in Whom All Life Begins; #---, Live with care and live with wisdom; #310, I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord

 

 

---

[1] Richard Carlson, Commentary on Ephesians 5:15-20, Working Preacher https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-20-2/commentary-on-ephesians-515-20-5 (accessed 12 August 2024)

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...

Scripture and singing

One of the interesting things about the scriptures and music is that in an awful lot of cases, there is not necessarily a lot said about the specifics of music, whether in the life of the Temple or in the fledgling early church. Music is not typically prescribed or proscribed among the body; if anything it seems to be more or less assumed with only occasional or minimal comment.

It is in the Psalms where some of the most interesting comment on music in liturgical practice appears. In those cases the comment is usually in the form of musical instruction, and is found not in the body of the psalm itself but in the small prefaces before psalms. Psalm 76, for example, has the instruction "with stringed instruments," as does Psalm 67, which is a fairly specific example of direction. Psalm 70 is recommended "for the memorial offering." Some psalms indicate, apparently, a known tune to which the psalm is recommended to be sung, such as Psalm 60, "according to The Lily of the Covenant" (sounds like it would be a nice tune, but we of course have no idea of how that tune sounds). Others are attributed to specific poets; David gets a lot of credits (whether those are accurate or not is another story), but a significant number of psalms are attributed to Asaph, a chief Temple musician. Otherwise, comment or instruction on music is rather limited in scripture.

A personal favorite reference to music in the Temple is found in the oft-overlooked book of 2 Chronicles. Verses 11-14 of chapter 5 describe a moment in the process of the dedication of Solomon's Temple, when the "levitical singers" (members of the priestly class, one presumes) were called up to sing out (with the "aid" of a hundred and twenty trumpets!!!) the refrain "for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever." As the chronicler tells it, when that song sounded with the trumpets,

the house, the house of the Lord, was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.

Let's face it, that's just cool, a moment of divine validation that any church musician would relish.

One other example of song from Hebrew Scripture is found in Ezra 3, in which a song is sung at the laying of the foundation of the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. It is a brief song, at least as is recorded in 3:11, consisting of the words “for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel.” (Notice how this verse echoes very clearly the refrain sung in 2 Chronicles 5.) Here there are also special instructions given about the performance: 3:10 indicates that priests were stationed to “praise the Lord with trumpets” (again echoing 2 Chronicles 5), and Levites – the “sons of Asaph” – were to do so with cymbals, “according to the directions of King David of Israel.” In addition, verse 11 states that the singers sang responsively, possibly indicating some form of back-and-forth between groups of singers. 

Of course, these examples are not particularly germane to our given subject here in at least one respect. In both the Psalms and 2 Chronicles, the singers in question are pretty clearly selected singers, not the whole body of the people. (As noted above, 2 Chronicles makes clear that the singers are the "levitical" singers.) Not surprisingly, to find biblical warrant for singing on the part of the congregation, we need to go to that portion of scripture that comes out of a period in which a congregation, or something like it, exists: the New Testament epistles.

There are two excerpts from those epistles that stand out; one offers a fairly explicit instruction in using song, and the other seems to be an example of using song in the way prescribed in the first example.

The third chapter of Colossians offers a hodgepodge of instruction for the believers in that place, some of which are commonplace and some of which get a little ugly (particularly from verse 18 onwards). Before that, though, verse 16 offers up this nugget:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.

This is about as explicit as you can get. The author instructs the people to sing, to sing a variety of music ("psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs"), and to sing with gratitude, and does so in the context of instruction to take in the word of Christ and to instruct one another in wisdom. This passage in Colossians, furthermore, has a close parallel in Ephesians 5:18-20, which speaks of “singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts” with the aforementioned psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

But look what happens in Philippians 2. In instructing the Philippians on humility, Paul ultimately points to Christ as an example. First encouraging them to look to one another's interests and needs, Paul then turns to the example of Christ -- but look how he does so in verses 5-11.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 

who, though he was in the form of God, 

did not regard equality with God 

as something to be exploited, 

but emptied himself, 

taking the form of a slave, 

being born in human likeness. 

And being found in human form, 

he humbled himself 

and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross. 

Therefore God also highly exalted him 

and gave him the name 

that is above every name, 

so that at the name of Jesus 

every knee should bend, 

in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 

and every tongue should confess 

that Jesus Christ is Lord, 

to the glory of God the Father. 

The text turns to poetry, or more precisely, a hymn -- apparently a hymn that had already come into at least some familiarity among the Christians in Philippi, if Paul felt free to make use of it here in this fashion. One wonders if some of the Philippians, upon hearing or reading this passage, slipped into at least humming or chanting the tune or speaking along with the text, or if the one presiding at the meeting might actually have broken into song or chant as he or she came to this text.

Notice, though, what these examples say about the use of song among the people. There is not only the basic act of singing, but the singing has the quality of instruction as well. The song is apparently expected to have enough substance and content to it to be useful as a means of "teaching and admonishing" as well as conveying gratitude and grace. I'm not sure, dear pastor, how often we think of this function when we ask our congregations to sing. It would seem imperative to give that part of our song together more consideration as we go forward.

Other examples or encouragements towards song in scripture are fairly slight. As Jesus’s last supper with his disciples came to a close, we are told in both Matthew’s and Mark’s gospels that they departed from the supper “when they had sung the hymn” (Mt 26:30; Mk 14:26); typically “the hymn” is presumed to be a hymn traditionally associated with the Passover meal, from Psalms 113-118. While the Matthew and Mark verses refer to “the hymn,” it would be hard to imagine that Jesus and his followers did not sing all of the hymns traditionally included in the Passover observance, and that the verses refer simply to singing the final hymn of the sequence, or possibly that all of the Hallel Psalms were sung together at the close of the meal. 

The applicability of the Last Supper hymn, or any of these examples of songs among the Body of Christ recorded in scripture, cannot truthfully be applied directly and without discernment to the situation of the modern church. No matter how much some pastors or thinkers might call or yearn for a “return to first-century Christianity,” the church we serve is still a twenty-first century church, and the multitudes of centuries that have passed since these were recorded in scripture are not going away.

These scriptural examples may not provide direct models for exact copying, but they can provide guidance and suggest basic ideas or principles that may be applied for the modern practice of music in worship. We see, for example, the use of instruments in worship in 2 Chronicles (as well as Psalm 150, among others), as well as the presence of a select group of singers (a choir, in other words). The Colossians reading points to the creation and use of hymns – original works of human creation – as part of the gathering of the people, and for instruction and exhortation. The Last Supper singing provides precedent for song associated with the Lord’s Supper or Communion in the modern church, as well as acknowledging psalms as material for singing. And all of these point to the ongoing presence of song in the gathering of the children of God. 

We can also note that these are not the only examples of song, or of particular songs, found in scripture. Indeed several examples of particular songs can be noted, particularly in Hebrew Scripture, where they are placed in the mouths of particular characters in particular situations. Some of them are relatively well-known, such as the song sung by the Israelites after their deliverance through the Red Sea (“horse and rider he has thrown into the sea,” Ex. 15:1), or the shorter song sung by Miriam and a group of women directly afterwards in verses 20 and 21, largely echoing phrases from the larger song. Other such relatively familiar songs include the “song of Deborah” in Judges 5, David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1, or David’s song of deliverance in 2 Samuel 22. 

Some of these songs seem unusual in their context. For example, in Numbers 21:17-18, the people of Israel are singing to a well, presumably beseeching the well to give water, or God to provide water. The song of 1 Samuel 18, in which Saul is celebrated as having slain thousands and “David his tens of thousands,” looks in context as a key moment in the growing schism between Saul and David. 

Perhaps the most unusual, or maybe unexpected song recorded in scripture is found in Deuteronomy 32, sometimes called the “Song of Moses.” Beginning in 31:19 God instructs Moses to write the song and teach it to the Israelites, as a form of witness. In this case, however, the “witness” found in the song is at least much a witness against the Israelites as it is a witness to the providence of God. The song will “confront them as a witness,” promises God (31:21), because God knows already how unfaithful the Israelites will be in their promised land. 

Indeed the song alternates between the gracious provision and unconquerable power of God (1-4, 7-14, 36-43) and the faithlessness of God’s people5-6, 15-35). While the NRSV indicates that Moses “recited all the words of this song” (31:30, 32:44) rather than singing it, it is still consistently described as a song. It would be hard to conceive of singing it, or even reciting it, before an assembly of the people. Nevertheless, Deuteronomy records this as one of the final acts of Moses: after a blessing of the tribes of the Israelites, he climbs up Mount Nebo to die. 

If these particular instances of song are even less prescriptive of the practice of song in the modern church, they may be even more indicative of the possibilities of song. If the Song of Moses can exist as an anticipatory reprimand of the people, certainly we are not free to ignore the call of Corinthians to not only teach, but to “admonish one another” in our song (Col. 3:16). The song of reprimand exists in scripture alongside songs of victory, such as that of Deborah. 

These examples point to one clear possibility. Music and singing are described in a wide variety of contexts, even if the number of references is not necessarily large. Might it be that the full life of the church, not only Sunday morning worship, could be more musical? Might the song of the people or even the sound of instruments be a greater part of the life of the church beyond Sunday?

At minimum, the ascetic stances of certain church leaders of the past simply do not hold up against the pervasive musical life of the people of God in both Hebrew Scripture and the early church. God’s people sing, scripture proclaims, in many ways and different settings. We can certainly do likewise.

2 Chronicles 5 is kind of a favorite of mine...

            

The Song of the Sorrowing Church

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.

Hymns: they're not just for worship anymore (actually, they never were)

So I've experienced something of a mild breakthrough in my most elementary experimentation in hymn-writing. A recently completed and posted hymn actually crossed the century mark in viewings on the little hymn blog I sporadically keep up. This recent hymn was not only viewed by a lot of friends, evidently, and maybe even some folks I don't know, but was also shared on the Facebook page of the presbytery in which I serve, which was a bit surprising, but nice.

This one is a bit more personal than most of my hymn efforts. While some were written to be used when preaching a particular sermon (like this one, which was so used, or this one, which didn't get completed in time for use), many had their roots in mundane old class assignments in seminary, and quite a few were pretty random, even to the point of waking me in the middle of the night and not letting me sleep until I wrote them down. This one was deliberate, a specific attempt to grapple with my own current health situation in hymnic form. It may have touched a nerve. (As of now it's the third-most viewed hymn on that blog, behind two of those linked just above.)

A friend let me know that she had shared the hymn with a friend of hers, who I gather to be in their own precarious health situation. This helped answer something that had been nagging at me, and also reminded me of a basic truth about hymns.

I was beginning to wonder if there might be a little vanity in posting these things online and social media. This isn't something from which one makes a living, and I have very little expectation that any of these hymns will go anywhere. So, why post? That piece of information gave me my answer; even if a hymn goes only one place, it might well be desperately needed in that place. As long as I'm going to write the things, letting them go out and possibly find a place where they might be needed or useful is only proper to do, I guess.

More basically, I was reminded that hymns, while most ideal for singing as a congregation, are not only for singing as a congregation. And they never have been.

Even before singing hymns in a congregation was a thing, such songs had another function; teaching. In a pre-literate age, one of the most effective ways of conveying a tidbit of doctrine or theology was in song; people liked to sing, and it gave that tidbit of learning a fighting chance of being remembered. They were a form of popular song, and were deeply tied to the theological teaching of those who wrote and taught them. (There's a whole scholarly book on this connection of hymn and theology in the work of Ambrose of Milan, who was writing such songs way back in the fourth century.) In other words, it's perfectly o.k. to sneak some hymnals into your Sunday school classrooms and let song break forth, and I don't just mean in the children's classrooms.

Clearly, a hymn can become a means of personal comfort. Here is where those wildly individualistic old hymns and gospel songs have potential value. In devotional use, a hymn that is all about "I" actually makes sense. While I'm always going to want to keep careful watch over how often such songs get into congregational use, personal devotional use is a natural home for such works.

Anyway, as I now launch into an extended leave of absence for those aforementioned medical reasons, I am beginning that time with a three-week stretch of professional development sandwiched around a week of vacation with my wife. The first of those events, later this week, is an actual workshop in hymn writing. Since what was little more than a dabble has begun to claim more of my attention, I figure I might as well probe a little further to see if there is something worth pursuing about it. I may just get shut down, or I may be encouraged. Who knows? But I am reminded that there are a lot more potential reasons to pursue such a venture besides Sunday mornings.

They even write books about using hymns as devotions, see?

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.

As has been mentioned on occasion here on this blog, I really try to stay in my mainline lane. This is in part because the mainline, as more or less always, needs to get its act together; in part because I'm not an evangelical, and my memories of when I was one aren't pleasant; and in part because as the two branches of the church currently stand I have a tough time even finding any kind of basis for even a starter conversation, particularly on the subject of music and worship where I have chosen to place myself.

(I also tend to avoid Patheos, most of the time, since they somehow decided an unrepentant Mark Driscoll was a good person to add to their roll of bloggers. Oh well.)

This particular post, however, somehow got brought to my attention (I blame Facebook). And while there are points here or there with which I can find some sympathy, and I'm an acknowledged non-fan of the so-called "contemporary" worship business, I'm a little bit uncerain whether the author here is overlooking something pretty basic about how large numbers of Christians of whatever make or model tend to approach worship.

As you can see, the author finds problematic the somewhat common practice of offering multiple worship services in varying "worship styles" (which he calls "cafeteria worship"; more on that later). To be precise, he contends that it is killing the church (which he almost immediately calls an oversimplification, to his credit).

I think on some level, while I can understand such frustration, the contention ignores something pretty basic. I don't know if it's "killing" the church to do multiple services in multiple styles, I am also dubious that it is particularly growing the church either, on the macro or micro level. For one thing, on the local level, it's pretty hard for any one church to actually be good at multiple styles of worship. The skill sets are not necessarily the same across the three. In such experience as I have, one of the worship services feels "native," for lack of a better word, while the other(s) feels like it's being done by people who don't really know how.

So, to address this, new folks are brought in. In this case, let's say it's an experienced "worship team" brought in to lead the contemporary service. Presumably under this leadership, it gets better. The pastor may still be involved, but it's pretty unlikely that she or he is actually overseeing this service, as that's not to be how it works when you've brought in a worship team. In a larger church, maybe one of the associate pastors ends up with primary responsibility for that service. Good for him/her, perhaps, a chance to lead more often. But as the two (or more) services grow more distinct in leadership and direction, guess what? For all practical purposes, you've got two (or more) churches. Give it enough time and the folks in one service don't even know the folks in the other.

And more, it isn't merely about worship being reduced to "my story," as the author puts it. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with the claim so much as I think it doesn't go far enough. Worship isn't merely reduced to "my story": worship is reduced to "mine."

A little experience here: a church in my past got into a heated disagreement over proposed changes to the two worship services needed due to personnel changes and slight decline in attendance. Make the changes to the other service. Don't change MY service. This was a very frequently repeated defense as the disagreement grew. MY service. MINE. All I can hear in my head is those birds from Finding Nemo. MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE MINE...

Here's the kicker: the two worship services were exactly the same. All the way through. Even the poor choir sang both services, although the membership represented in each was different (and this was apparently part of the problem, one "branch" of the choir was losing too many members to keep up the pace). But no one could countenance a change to MY worship.

As you might guess, MY worship isn't really worship, or virtually cannot be. It doesn't go outward at all. It is constrictive to the soul, but then there's a pretty good chance that the effect works in the opposite direction; constriction of soul rigidifies worship, or capacity to respond in worship, until the only worship acceptable is MY worship.

(Oh, and attempts to blame such rigidity on, say, reliance upon liturgy as a structure for worship - which I have heard lobbed around - make about as much sense as insisting that all humans must alike because we all have skeletons. Don't be fatuous. "Free" worship can get just as samey as anything liturgy-based.)

In short, while disuptes over musical styles often take the blame for disputes over worship, the root is much deeper in most cases. At that root, we will find that, no matter our tradition, we are at odds with one another over the very question of what worship is and what it is for. Until we are coming together on why we are even there on Sunday morning or whatever time we gather, all the musical questions in the world won't get us anywhere.

Don't blame the music, whatever style it may be. We're going to have to look deeper and ask more challenging questions. And there's no guarantee, even if we do find a way forward, that such understanding will stop a church's or the church's "decline" however one is defining that.

Ultimately, we might as well put our energy and passion into, oh, I don't know...worshiping God.