SING A NEW SONG (excerpt from God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To)
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"If it was good enough for Isaac Watts, it’s good enough for
me.” Few of us would come right out and say this, but I confess to thinking
along those lines. Over two decades of writing and speaking about singing and
liturgy, I’ve been accused of being a liturgical traditionalist. Skim through
the proliferation of lyrics mass-produced in recent decades, and, whatever your
particular taste in music, it’s impossible not to observe how different they
are from the psalms and hymns the Church has been singing for centuries. That’s
precisely by design. They were written not only to be different, but to be
better, more relevant, to conform to a new ethos.
Some years ago, while visiting a church on our family vacation, we were
invited to rise and sing the following:
You are my wholeness,
You are my completeness.
In you I find forgiveness,
Yes, in you I find release.
It’s a wonder you take all those blunders I make
And so graciously offer me peace.
Bewildered, I reread the lines. Unless I was missing something, it
appeared that the writer of these words had managed to flip everything around.
The eternal living God who made the earth, the sky, the sea, and all that in
them is, had been reduced to a means of individual self-discovery, “you are my
completeness,” the added bauble that finally makes me whole, as if God were a
fashion accessory that puts the finishing touch on my outfit.
I looked around the congregation. Hands were raised; eyes were pinched
shut with emotion. What was I missing? There were references to forgiveness and
peace, vague ones, but blunders? Only those “who think of sin but lightly” will
refer to their offences as blunders. The psalmist uses no such reductionist
terminology. “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in
your sight” (51:4). To my ear, the flouncy cadence of the lines about blunders
sounded so different from the earnest sobriety of David on his face confessing
his evil to a holy God.
But, surely, this song had to get better. How could it get worse?
And in you I find true friendship,
Yes, your love is so free of demands,
Though it must hurt you so,
You keep letting me go
To discover the person I am.
Maybe I was being too critical, and the lyricist was onto a deeper truth
in the line, “your love is so free of demands.” I wanted to be more generous,
find at least a morsel of truth that might redeem these lines.
While I cast about, I tried to picture the persecuted church singing
this; imagine Christian martyrs throughout the centuries lustily joining in
with “your love is so free of demands” as the fagots were lit beneath their
feet at the stake. Not only was it nonsensical, singing this made a mockery of
the persecuted church, then and now. Isaac Watts put it far better: “Love, so
amazing, so divine/Demands my soul, my life, my all.”
It felt like the fabricator of this ditty of self-actualization had
learned his theology from a pop-psychology textbook—not from the Word of God.
Truth and the honor of Christ were at stake. I looked down the pew at my family;
we all stopped singing.
Historically, the finest poetry woos us away from self-absorption and
makes us less self-referential. The best poetry “turn(s) us from ourselves to thee,”
as one poet put it. The Christian’s chief end is to do all things to the glory
of God alone; how much more so when we are taking poetic words on our lips,
addressing God in sung worship?
Though we were no longer giving voice to these words, the rest of the
congregation dutifully murmured onward:
And like a father you long to protect me,
Yet you know I must learn on my own.
Well, I made my own choice,
To follow your voice,
Guiding me unto my home.
Impotent and passive, the father figure portrayed by this lyricist now
sits wringing his hands and waiting. How vastly different this is from the God
of the Bible: “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the
beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall
stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” (Isaiah 46:9-10). How equally
dissimilar this is from the God portrayed in the rich canon of the Church’s
hymnody.
The final plumage of self-praise in “You Are My Wholeness” shifted to praising the songwriter’s own
choice. Unwittingly, all those who sing these words are praising themselves for
following someone’s voice. We’re left to fill in many gaps, including who this
someone is. Though the Apostle Paul calls us to do everything in the name of
Jesus Christ (Colossians 3:17), oddly, while ostensibly singing to him, there
is zero mention of the triune God, Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, in this
reductionist doggerel.
Wouldn’t ruined sinners rescued by Christ want to sing more like this?
Why was I made to hear thy voice,
And enter while there’s room,
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?
SING A NEW SONG
Hence, I confess, because of lyrics like “You Are My Wholeness,” I had retreated into traditionalism.
There’s so many great psalm versifications and hymns to sing, let’s solve the
problem. Instead of being subjected to such unworthy lyrical nonsense, let’s
simply stick with the best of the past. I thought I’d found my safe place in
self-righteous traditionalism.
Until reading in Psalms. I love singing Psalms, and I’ve always tried to
avoid debate with my exclusive-psalm-singing brethren. “Oh, you only sing
Psalms?” Only? The Psalms are the
very words God breathed by his Spirit to the ancient poets who penned them.
There’s nothing only about them. But
it was throughout those very psalms that I was repeatedly called to sing a new
song (33, 40, 96, 98, 144, 149). As the psalms were once new expressions of
praise for old covenant deliverances, so new manifestations of the gracious
deliverance of our God call for new “songs of loudest praise” to give voice and
substance to our new covenant gratitude.
But it wasn’t just in Psalms. In Revelation the saints and angelic
hosts, in a culminating torrent of splendor “…sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy
are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by
your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people
and nation’” (5:9). My traditionalism was getting pummeled.
THE MOUTHS OF BABES
Meanwhile, my children began to work on me. “Daddy, don’t read us
another book. Tell us a story, one you make up yourself.” I pointed to the
walls of books in our home. There are so many wonderful things to read. “No,
Daddy, make up a story.” That was twenty years ago. I’ve been making up stories
ever since, my children often my chief critics. But writing books was one
thing. Attempting to write a new hymn terrified me.
Then, I hit on a solution. I would have a character in one of my
children’s books (The Accidental Voyage)
write a hymn. Throughout the story, my protagonist gnawed his pencil in fits
and starts. It was perfect. If he managed to craft a poem that resembled a
singable hymn, I was safe. More likely, if my efforts in his persona were an
unmitigated disaster, I simply blamed the adolescent protagonist. What do you
expect from a twelve-year-old? I felt liberated and furiously worked in secret
on several other hymns. But exposure was around the corner.
After writing a birthday sonnet for a pastor friend of mine, he asked me
to write a new hymn for the Thanksgiving service—in a week. His was a
discerning congregation of hymn-savvy Presbyterians. What did he think I was, a
performing circus animal able to crank out poetry that would stand up to their
scrutiny? I declined.
Besides, my father, after a long battle with cancer, had recently died.
I didn’t feel much like writing a new hymn. We had sung hymns at my father’s
bedside, recited and sang psalms, the thirty-fourth emerging as one of his
favorites. “This poor man cried to you and you delivered him out of all his
trouble.” He would often ask me to read it, then lean back on his pillow, close
his eyes, and smile as I read.
Though I had declined to write the hymn, I found
myself looking up biblical passages on thanksgiving, always drawn back to my
father's favorite Psalm and the phrase, “O, taste and see that the Lord is
good.” I was thrilled with the Eucharist and Lord’s Supper implications of the
text. But the days before the Thanksgiving service were clicking by and all I
had was an initial idea. Neophyte muse that I was, how could I possibly write a
hymn in so short a time, one that would be worthy of the high worship of God?
Three days before the Thanksgiving service, I
managed to produce five stanzas that began like this:
We rise and worship you, our Lord,
With grateful hearts for grace outpoured,
For you are good—O taste and see—
Great God of mercy rich and free.
The next stanzas explored the salvific roles of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for which every Christian has unmeasured cause
for thanksgiving. To match the poetic meter, the accompanist had chosen a Long
Meter existing tune. As the congregation rose, I sweated and fidgeted as we
sang this new song.
HOSTILITY TO FORM
As Augustine put it, “I count myself among those who learn as they write
and write as they learn.” And did I ever need to learn several important things
about hymns and writing them in these early efforts.
My poetry tutorials, however, began much earlier. God placed me in a
hymn-singing, literary home, where we would snuggle up on the couch and listen
to my mother read aloud from Shakespeare, even Chaucer in Middle English. Not
understanding a word, I was charmed by the sounds and cadence of the poetry. In
my adult life, during decades of teaching history and literature, including the
writing of poetry, I watched with mounting apprehension as our culture
descended further into a post-poetry, post-literacy malaise, the Church
dutifully in tow.
Along with post-modernity’s hostility to form, dismantling culture and
disfiguring art, our ability to define and appreciate poetry has been marred.
We’re taught to disparage poetic conventions such as meter and rhyming, and
anything else that gives shape and order to art. Literary experts say that we
are to read poetry just like we read prose, as if poetry was a literary birth
defect of prose rather than its own genre with its own rhetorical qualities.
For thousands of years, poetry has included various metrical patterns
and parallelisms of sound, rhyming being one of the most delightful and
anticipated. In our moment, however, vers
libre, is celebrated as the highest form of poetry, emotive free verse that
defies the conventions of the ages. With lines capriciously designated, much of
this material is little more than fragmented prose masquerading as poetry.
Literary elites assure us that traditional poets were simply being cute
with words, showing off, being crafty in their slavish devotion to convention.
I wonder if they might also tell us that Michelangelo was just being crafty
with marble, that medieval architects were simply showing off with
stone-vaulted ceilings, or that J. S. Bach was merely being cute with
counterpoint.
Critics of poetic conventions asked 20th century poet Robert
Frost why he didn’t write in free verse; he replied with an apt simile,
“Writing poetry that doesn’t rhyme is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Frost believed that there was something inherent in the genre that demanded
structural boundaries if it is to be what it is. But his was a voice crying in
a literary wilderness.
CONGREGATIONAL PASSIVITY
How does this relate to sung worship? Observe the congregation in a contemporary
service, and it becomes clear that it is difficult to sing lyrics composed to
post-poetry dictates. Throughout much of Western Civilization, poetry was
composed to be sung by the whole clan. Today, singing is now largely done for
us by commercially popular, celebrity entertainers, or those who imitate them.
The congregation has become avid listeners, but increasingly inept participants
in full-voice singing.
Finding myself a guest in many different churches, most arranged with
the entertainers and their instruments on center stage, I’ve been observing
congregational singing for years. Many people are not singing at all,
especially the men, and most of those whose lips are moving, are murmuring more
than full-voice singing. Why is that?
Whatever our playlists look like, and however lustily we might sing in
the privacy of our cars, let’s be frank, one who is not a pop musician feels
uncomfortable attempting in public to sing like a solo-voice entertainer. It
turns out, though they call themselves worship leaders, they are not leading
us. They are doing it for us. Our participation is irrelevant to the
performance. Join in if you care to; either way, it will not change the
instrumental, high-volume sound pulsing through the worship center.
CONGREGATIONAL SINGING
So, how are we to write, compose, and sing new songs that reflect the
ethos of worship rather than the ethos of entertainment? David played his harp,
a solo performer—for the sheep. But he wrote psalms to be sung by the
congregation, young and old, without any consideration for generational
preferences. Hence, as we attempt to craft new songs, the hymn writer will not
write for a solo performer or for a choir. A good hymn could be sung by either,
but the writer of a new hymn, like David, will intentionally craft poetry
accessible for the whole congregation of God’s people to sing with full voice.
When Christians of all ages and various singing abilities rise to their
feet to sing the praises of their Redeemer, if things are to be done decently
and in order, they will want to sing with one voice. Though it is more
difficult to observe when hymn poetry is subordinated to the musical score, as
in American hymnals, for centuries, virtually all hymns have been written in
regular rhyme and meter. Solo entertainers can sing metrically irregular songs,
and often do, but singing free verse worship songs is difficult for the
congregation.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD HYMN?
Our greatest problem discerning what is worthy to sing in worship is
firstly a theological problem. Egalitarians don’t make good worshipers.
Sinners, undone by their crimes in the face of a holy God, falling on their
faces before the Sovereign Lord who has paid their vast debt in full with his
precious blood, make better worshipers. We must get our theology right before
we can correct our doxology.
Another problem we have with evaluating what is worthy to sing in
worship is that we no longer think of hymns as poetry, and in our post-poetry
culture, we have lost the literary tools to require the highest standards for
that poetry. What we sing before the face of our Redeemer in worship must be
the finest human poetry, set to the most appropriate human music, shaped by the
biblical ethos of worship.
Music in worship is not firstly about loud instruments, multi-colored
lights, or soloists aping entertainment celebrities, as we see in the
ubiquitous nightclub liturgy of our present situation. Music in worship is
first and last about the voice of the congregation singing to and with one
another the word of Christ. Paul put it this way:
Let the word of
Christ dwell in you richly as you teach
and admonish one
another with all wisdom, and as
you sing psalms,
hymns and spiritual songs with
gratitude in your
hearts to God. And whatever you
do, whether in word
or deed, do it all in the name of
the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks to God the Father
through him
(Colossians 3:16-17).
Here, Paul tells us how and what to sing. New songs of new covenant
worship find their substance and boundaries in this locus classicus of sung worship. Notice, three times we are told to
take Christ’s name on our lips in our singing, and we’re told three times in
the whole context of the passage to sing our thanksgiving. Which strongly
suggests that new lyrics will be Christ-centered and filled with gratitude.
The passage reveals three more functions of hymns, summarized by
hymnologist Erik Routley: New covenant hymns will codify doctrine (“teach and
admonish”), unify the Church (“one another”), and glorify God (“to God”). We
have seen decay of all three of these functions in most of the new songs of
recent decades. Praise choruses and worship songs have been generally
reductionist in theological content, saying less and less about doctrinal
truths, often never using the name of Christ.
Furthermore, instead of unifying the Church, the shift to lyrics and
music that suit the ethos of entertainment, has created a generational rift,
disunifying the Church. Some churches have a traditional service and a
contemporary one, thus, dividing the congregation by tastes and age rather than
bringing Christians together with one voice in song. A good test if a lyric
will unify the Church is to ask if the persecuted church would choose to sing
it; would the early church sing it; would Christians have sung it in the
Reformation, the Great Awakening, or the Missionary Movement of the 19th
century?
Lastly, the third function of singing to the glory of God has been under
attack for decades. When churches prefer singing what entertainers sing at
concerts, or what Christian radio stations are playing, there is a pull to
imitate the entertainment industry and its popular celebrity method of singing,
church worship leaders now attempting to look like and sound like they are on
stage at a concert.
The
late Keith Green, himself a vanguard of contemporary Christian singing, was offended
by the “‘look at me!’ attitude I have seen at concert after concert, and the
‘Can’t you see we are as good as the world!’ syndrome” of fellow rock and roll
performers. Decades later, would Green be less offended by what he would see were
he alive today?
However noble the intentions, the entertainment arrangement is the
perfect storm for singing to the glory of the performers on the stage. Routley
quips that when the three functions of hymns, codify, unify, glorify, are
absent, he wished for the song to have “the short life of all rootless things.”
NEW REFORMATION HYMNS
Finally, Paul tells us to write and sing new hymns “with all wisdom,”
that is to do so skillfully; which means those who presume to craft new hymn
lyrics or compose tunes for those lyrics need to study, develop their skills,
know what they are attempting, stand on the shoulders of the great hymn writers
of the past—Cowper, Watts, Wesley, Havergal, Bonar and many others.
It was while immersed in the study of our hymnody that I became so reluctant
to attempt writing a new hymn. How could I possibly measure up with the best
hymn writers of the past? Then it occurred to me: I don’t
write books because I think I’m the best writer in the world, any more than I
love my wife because I think I’m the best husband in the world, any more than I
parent my kids because I think I’m the best parent in the world, any more than
I worship Christ because I think I’m the best worshiper in the world. Neither
do I write hymns because I think I’m the best hymn writer in the world.
Then,
one frosty December evening, as I scribbled in front of the fire, I found
myself toying with the idea of attempting a carol. When I came to my senses, I
contemplated tossing my notes into the fire. What was I thinking? Christ’s Advent?
The sacred mystery? Angelic heralds? The culmination of thousands of years of
prophecy? The best of the existing carol canon guaranteed failure. Carols are
uniquely rich with celebratory atmosphere, evocative of rejoicing and feasting,
sleigh bells, and every charming winter association imaginable. Hymnologists
tell us the best-loved hymn of all time is actually a carol, Charles Wesley’s “Hark,
the Herald Angels Sing.” It was literary suicide to attempt a carol.
Because of my fears,
early scribblings for this carol lay dormant for several years; hymn writing
can sometimes be like that for me, an initial burst of ideas, then nothing,
just an imaginative black hole. And then another Advent season approached. I
read aloud from Luke’s gospel with my family; we sang a carol. When the kids
were tucked in their beds, I pulled out my initial notes and sifted through the
scribbled idea banks and word banks. Late that night, with fear and trembling,
I managed to set down six stanzas as they appear below, beginning with the
angelic announcement of Christ’s Advent to the shepherds, proceeding to our
Lord’s sinless life, Gethsemane and the cross, the resurrection, concluding
with Christ’s triumphant Second Advent.
What wonder filled the starry night
When Jesus came with heralds bright!
I marvel at his lowly birth,
That God for sinners stooped to earth.
His splendor laid aside for me,
While angels hailed his Deity,
The shepherds on their knees in fright
Fell down in wonder at the sight.
The child who is the Way, the Truth,
Who pleased his Father in his youth,
Through all his days the Law obeyed,
Yet for its curse his life he paid.
What drops of grief fell on the site
Where Jesus wrestled through the night,
Then for transgressions not his own,
He bore my cross and guilt alone.
What glorious Life arose that day
When Jesus took death’s sting away!
His children raised to life and light,
To serve him by his grace and might.
One day the angel hosts will sing,
“Triumphant Jesus, King of kings!”
Eternal praise we’ll shout to him
When Christ in splendor comes again!
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