Such is the case with Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Divine Comedy.

Many of us came across at least part of the Comedy somewhere in school. Perhaps we’ve read the Inferno, where, in the chilling words of C. S. Lewis, God says to the sinner, “Thy will be done.” Perhaps we took a course that included the Purgatorio, where those whose sins have been covered and who are guaranteed a place in heaven experience cleansing from the pollution of their sins. Fewer of us, probably, have tasted of the Paradiso, where dance and song become more and more prominent as the soul rises to God.

The Origin

Less known is the fact that the Divine Comedy is itself a product of exile. For Dante, homelessness became a permanent feature “in the middle of his life.” At about age 35 and at the height of a promising calling as poet and politician, Dante experienced a dramatic and devastating reversal of fortune at the hands of political enemies. He then spent the last 20 or so years of his life — when he did most of the writing for the Divine Comedy — away from home, “knowing the salty taste of others’ bread” (bread in his native Florence was made without salt) and “going up and down stairs” as a guest in homes not his own.

Separated from his family, and with his career in ruins, Dante awakes “alone” (literally) “in a dark wood” (metaphorically). From this vantage point, he looks anew at himself, at the human condition, and at the Christian story.

He writes about an imagined meeting with two people. In the Inferno he comes across a fellow poet-statesman, Pier delle Vigne, who found himself — like Dante — betrayed and suddenly out of favor (Inf. XIII). This soul’s response was suicide. Delle Vigne gave up on living and sought grim satisfaction through his suicide against those who had wronged him.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the Paradiso, on the other hand, Dante meets his own great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida (Par. XV-XVIII). Cacciaguida recounts pilgrimage to the Holy Land and his battles for truth as a Crusader. Then he forecasts in some detail his great-great-grandson’s exile, but promises that Dante’s fame will shine all the brighter “for having become a party of your own.” Cacciaguida challenges Dante to take advantage of his poetic gifts to become a pilgrim and crusader in his own right: to journey deeper into the Christian story and tell the truth about what’s wrong with us and with the church.

Chosen Journey

It was writing this extraordinary song of 14,000 lines that turned Dante’s exile into a pilgrimage. Dante sang his lament, and his forced exit from home became a chosen journey into the heart of God’s redeeming story. Not only that, but his personal loneliness drove him to realize that his true community was vast and personal, comprised of every soul for whom Christ died and who will attain resurrection life. And by writing his “new song” in the people’s Italian rather than the church’s Latin, Dante invites every one of us into his party.

Many of us have experienced exiles not unlike Dante’s. Not everybody who shows up on a Sunday morning has had a great week. Many are in marriages than make them feel they’d be less lonely single. Some will have heard from a boss that week, “We’re moving in a different direction…” Nearly all are acutely aware they are not the person they wish they were.

What can we offer? Well, we can make sure not to skirt the painful and difficult parts of the Bible’s story in worship. We can make sure the psalms of lament are read and sung. We can use art that tells the truth about the Christian life as journey. We can offer generous opportunity for the most basic of Christian prayers: “Lord, have mercy.”

Perhaps the most important thing we as worship leaders can offer is ourselves as “living epistles” of what it is to live in pilgrimage rather than exile. Perhaps there are artists or poets who draw profound emotions or deep thoughts from you, who point you to Christ’s suffering and glory and your place in them. “Alone and in a dark wood” not long ago myself, I found in Dante a soul-mate and a guide through the dark wood. Maybe he could be the same for you, or — perhaps you have your own song to write.

Occasionally, an ancient writer hits you with a jaw-droppingly fresh insight. The first theologian to discover the power of the idea of Jesus as God’s “New Song” was Clement of Alexandria in the early 200’s: “I have called Him a New Song.”

This is the promise He (Jesus) made to the Father: “I will declare your name to My brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I sing praises to You” (Heb 2:12).

Clement then asks Christ:

… to sing praises, and declare to me God Your Father. Your story will save, Your song will instruct me.

Clement ministered in a city that had been founded 500 years earlier by Alexander the Great as the portal for bringing Greek “reason” and “culture” to the “unenlightened” and “uncultured” East. In addition, Alexandria had long been home to a large number of Jews in permanent exile. Alexandria was the place where the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Alexandria was also the center of an intellectual approach to Judaism that had come close to reducing Israel’s story of redemption to a mere philosophy of moral improvement.

The genius of Clement lies in his ability to take an Old Testament motif of a New Song (see Isa 42:10; Ps 33:3) that is fulfilled in the New Testament (Rev 5:9; 14:3) and apply it creatively and redemptively in a non-Christian world that already had its own thoughts about music.

Magic of Music

Ancient Greece was fascinated with music, imagining the cosmos itself to reverberate to various musical modes. Personifying the magic of music was the Greek hero Orpheus. His music was supposed to have tamed beasts and moved inanimate objects. In classical Greece, great contests of song — of Olympian proportion — honored Orpheus’s memory. By the time of the emergence of Christianity, however, buffoons like Nero (who rigged musical contests to make himself the winner) made a mockery of this memory. Still, the games went on — an unending run of American Idol, despite a talent drain.

Everlasting New Song

There is a “harmony” to the universe, grants Clement in his extended tract Exhortation to the Greeks. But that “harmony” has nothing to do with speculation about musical modes, and everything to do with the “symphony” of being that has constituted the Trinity from eternity.

With the fatherly purpose of God … and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man too, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument of the universe He (the Word of God) makes music to God.

This eternal “harmony” and “symphony” between Father, Word, and Spirit became concrete when the Word became a human being. Christ came to make us like himself and to draw us into the eternal relationship — the eternal “harmony” and “symphony” — that has always existed within the godhead.

Jesus the New Song

Thus, Clement proclaims: “Because the Word lately took a name — the name consecrated of old and worthy of power, the Christ, I have called him a New Song.” And while ancient Greeks mythologize and fantasize about a revered hero of the past taming beasts through song, Christians know a more powerful Singer:

He is the only one who ever tamed the most intractable of all wild beasts — human beings. For he tamed birds, that is, people who are flighty; reptiles, that is, those who are crafty; lions, that is, the passionate; swine, that is, those who are pleasure-loving; wolves, that is, the rapacious. … All these most savage beasts, … the heavenly song of itself transformed into gentle people. …

See how mighty is the New Song! It has made … humans out of wild beasts. They who were otherwise dead, who had no share in the real and true life, revived when they heard the song.

Those who awake to God’s song of redemption

will dance with angels around the unbegotten and only imperishable and only true God, the Word of God joining us in our hymn of praise.

What an amazing thought! Clement compellingly contextualized biblical imagery to speak to a culture of disbelief at the beginning of the 3rd century. May we at the beginning of the 3rd millennium be as faithfully creative. Because the story Jesus tells still saves, and the song He sings still instructs.

As the credits roll in the movie I Am Legend, Bob Marley sings:

Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
‘Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs.

An artful choice. Marley’s reggae music provides the movie’s central character, Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) a slender line of hope. He’s reluctant to believe that in his post-apocalyptic world there’s a God with a plan, reluctant to believe even that any other non-zombie humans exist. Marley’s voice from a healthier world helps him fend off despair.

Many of us know what it is to feel cut off — to have no sense that there’s a master plan. The driver from hell nearly runs you off the road. Cash flow is negative. A relationship unravels. Evil reigns in the world, good is thwarted at every turn. And you go: “Am I left alone?”

Will Smith had Bob Marley’s reggae. I have the book of Psalms — and I have them in the ancient church’s plainsong.

Echoed Cries

The Psalms invite me to tell God’s people’s story as my own:

• The betrayals of David, then of my Redeemer, and now, to my astonishment, of me — I find I share — I mean really share — by virtue of taking David’s and Jesus’ words as my very own: “Even my best friend, the one I trusted, … has turned against me” (Ps 41:9 NLT).

• Warnings made to others become warnings I send to my own unbelieving heart: “… they did not wait for His counsel” (Ps 106:13).

• Promises made to others, I take for myself — “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).

• Wisdom aimed at people three millennia ago I sing as though I had discovered it myself: “… I almost lost my footing … For I envied the proud” (Ps 73:2a,3a).

The power lies not just in the Psalms’ words, though. It lies also in their music. “He who reads the Torah without chant, of him can it be said as it is written, ‘the laws that I gave you were not good,’” says the Mishnah’s Rabbi Johanan. How much more true of the psalms. Ancient Israel chanted the psalms. The ancient church chanted them as well. “A soul rightly ordered by chanting the sacred words forgets its own afflictions and contemplates with joy the things of Christ alone,” maintained Athanasius of Alexandria in the 4th century.

Fact is, when truth becomes song, you know it at a deeper level.

Spanning Time

This past Advent, I began chanting psalms in my daily devotions. I’m doing so using the eight ancient plainsong chant tones that have their origins in the Gregorian musical revolution of the middle of the 1st millennium, as recovered and restored in the late 19th century. James Litton has adapted them for church and individual singing in his handsome volume, The Plainsong Psalter (Church Publishing Inc., 1988; ISBN: 978-0809691627 — hardback, quarto-sized, $40).

A couple of friends on the other side of the country have bonded with me in an arrangement of spirit. We’re simply following the course laid out in the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer (which serves as the text base for The Plainsong Psalter). It takes seven weeks to chant through the psalms, a pace of about three psalms per day. It’s a tempo that works for me.

The great thing about chant is that you don’t have to force the text into an artificial meter. Chanting allows the text to take its own meter and rhythm. In a given line, singers stay on a chanting tone all the way up to the last note (or two or three) of a phrase.

Indigenously Christian

The plainsong music is lovely. Tone 1 is the basis for the tune most of us know as “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” And if you’ve admired Allegri’s Miserere, you’ll recognize Tone 2 to be the cantor’s melody.

In the early hours of the morning I enjoy the fellowship across 1500 years or so with folks who have shared these psalms in similar fashion. I love the bold aspiration of the original Gregorians: to create a music that all believers could sing and that was trying to be indigenously Christian, but that was in positive dialogue with the best music theory of its day.

In this world that is beyond crazy I enjoy having my “soul rightly ordered” as I sing redemption songs, plainsong-style.

He who hung the earth is hanging.
He who fixed the heavens in place has been fixed in place.
He who laid the foundations of the universe has been laid on a tree.
The master has been profaned.
God has been murdered…

But He rose up from the dead
and mounted up to the heights of heaven.
When the Lord hath clothed Himself with humanity,
and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer,
and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned,
and had been judged for the sake of the condemned,
and had been buried for the sake of the one who had been buried,
He rose up from the dead,
and cried with a loud voice,
“Who is it that contends with me?
Let him stand in opposition to me.
I set the condemned man free;
I gave the dead man life;
I raised up one who had been entombed.
Who is my opponent?
I am the Christ
I am the one who destroyed death,
and triumphed over the enemy,
and trampled Hades underfoot,
and bound the strong one,
and carried off humanity
to the heights of heaven.”
“It is I,” says the Christ.

This Easter finds me at the happy convergence of three memorable texts (my life’s story could pretty much be told in terms of what I read). The first is this one, Melito of Sardis’ (ca. A.D. 195) remarkable Easter sermon (I’ve extracted lines from near the end of the sermon) — a text that Bob Webber often extolled for its so-called “Christus Victor” theme.

God is crucified so that humanity can rise, Melito practically sings. This death of God and resurrection of man is the means by which “the One who sits on the throne’ says, ‘I make all things new’” (Revelation 21:5). This “all things” is, well, “all things.” Praise be. Art is new. Science is new. As are gardening, cooking, playing, singing.

It was with Melito’s sermon dancing around in my brain that I serendipitously came upon this thought from sociologist Werner Stark:

The truths of religion can be much more easily and much less inadequately expressed in artistic than in linguistic terms — or better, in the language of art than in the language of science. St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymns are much more convincing, so far as live faith is concerned, than even his best arguments. … Max Weber coined a more remarkable phrase than he knew when he called himself on one occasion “religiously deaf.” But those who can hear will find, for instance, in Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum a statement of faith, which is not only supremely moving but also experientially satisfying and convincing. The rationalistic demotion of art to something ‘merely sentimental’ is not the least disservice which the discursive intellect has done to religion, and, indeed, to all humanity. The fact is and remains that the rationalist as such has no ear for the divine call (Werner Stark, Sociology of Religion, Vol IV [ Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969], p. 72).

The third text is complement to the second: R.R. Reno’s commendation in First Things (Mar. 27, 2009) of David Hart’s new book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009) — a book that is an attempt to get the “religiously deaf” to listen to their own folly. From Reno’s remarks I extract but this thought:

“The revolutions that genuinely alter human reality at the deepest levels,” Hart writes, “are those that first convert the minds and wills, that reshape the imagination and reorient desire, that overthrow tyrannies within the soul.” Christianity caused such a revolution, and it did so, Hart claims, with its fundamental claim about Christ: In him each one of us can join our humble humanity to the glory and holiness of God.

Honor, laud, and glory to our crucified and risen Christus Victor.

And fivefold thanks.

Thanks, first, for the utter graciousness by which Jesus came.

Thanks, second, for the loving faithfulness that brought Jesus back from death to life.

Thanks, third, for the Spirit’s kiss by which I find myself astonishingly not “religiously deaf.”

Thanks, fourth, for the host of gifted saints and fellow-travelers (from all times and all places) who have given us such stunning musical and artistic expressions of the glory of Holy Week’s story.

Thanks, fifth, for the fact that ours is a faith that satisfies the itch to compose hymns and that prompts us to make our best arguments as well.

When I became a Christian, God crashed through all that. He is. Truth matters. We’re broken, and he had to fix us. As John’s gospel maintains:

There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. … And the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory (John 1:9,14).

Each Advent/Christmas season seems to bring its own “zinger,” a fresh reminder that the gospels tell more than a good story. They tell the One True Story.

My first Christmas as a Christian, the zinger was Handel’s Messiah. The music wasn’t unfamiliar, but the notion that the Bible was a coherent whole was new. And to hear this One True Story sung — well, it resonated with something deep in my soul. I wept through the performance.

This year’s zinger was the rebroadcast of an episode of House, titled “Fetal Position” (from Season 3). For the TV-averse, Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurey) is an über-competent, but über-über-narcissistic surgeon. House is as always right about medicine as he is unfailingly wrong about, well, everything else, from relationships to ethics.

In this episode, House has to weigh the health of a pregnant woman against that of the baby in her womb. It’s not a huge conflict for House, actually, because what’s in her is just a “thing” as far as he is concerned. Studiously and forcefully, he denies the humanity of the unborn, and airily prescribes abortion when the “fetus’s” illness threatens the pregnant woman’s life.

The aspiring mother, Emma, however, would rather die than lose her baby. Against his better judgment, House winds up in the operating room, performing prenatal surgery.

No sooner does he open an incision in Emma’s uterus than the baby reaches out an arm and grabs House’s index finger with a tiny hand. House’s quip, “I just remembered I forgot to TiVo Alien,” fails to mask the revelation that’s just taken place. His eyes tell the tale, as does his thumb as it caresses the tiny hand.

After the (successful) surgery, House visits Emma. She’s amazed, she remarks, that she’s going to be OK.

“What’s amazing is how blonde your baby’s hair is.”

“My baby?”

“Yeah, that thing in your belly that tried to kill you.”

“You’ve never called him a baby before.”

The banter goes on, but House’s eyes betray him again.

Before a final lovely scene of Emma hugging her newborn months later, the penultimate scene has House at home sitting in front of the TV, popping pain-killers. In the background Lucinda Williams’ haunting voice sings “Are You Alright”:

Are you sleeping through the night?
Do you have someone to hold you tight?
Do you have someone to hang out with?
Do you have someone to hug and kiss you,
Hug and kiss you, hug and kiss you?
Are you alright?

As the lyrics unfold, House’s eyes transition from retro-TV images of dinosaurs to his own fingers. He watches his thumb caressing the place where Emma’s boy had reached out of her womb to take hold of his finger.

Out of the womb of Mary, I am reminded, God’s tiny little hand grabs mine.

I can’t not respond. I can’t not return the caress. I can’t call God a myth, a nice idea or a projection of our best hopes for ourselves. I can’t not be grateful that Someone is there, holding tight, hanging out, hugging and kissing.

More to follow …

Occasionally, someone (thanks, Mom) asks where to find it. So, here it is …

BACH, BUBBA, AND THE BLUES BROTHERS: THE SINGING SAVIOR’S MANY VOICES

Spend a few years leading music in a church or seminary setting, and you will eventually hear all of the following. I have.

“We’re going to do happening music in the 8:30 service, and if the geriatrics don’t like it, they can go to the 11:00 service.”

“To put it bluntly: Bach is simply better music, and if people can’t handle a superior aesthetic in worship, well, there are plenty of other churches in town.”

“I’m so glad this church doesn’t do all that boring music from the past. We’re singing ‘a new song.’ As for the old stuff, Jesus said: ‘Let the dead bury their own dead.’ End of discussion.”

“No way will we use so-called contemporary worship music in my church. Its roots are in rock ‘n roll, so it’s inevitably associated with the wrong kind of people. Using that music in church would suggest we approve of immoral lifestyles.”

“I guess I can stomach my church’s worship OK, but it’s really too tame for me. The ‘worldly’ music I listen to on the radio at least has intensity. It gets to your gut and fires your imagination. What we do in my church — you know — the hymns and stuff, is just too safe musically. It puts my spirit to sleep.”

“Well, everybody knows that music with the beat on 2 and 4 comes from Africa, which, unfortunately, is still steeped in primitive tribalism — the music carries overtones of Satan-worship and the occult. So, Christians have no business going near that stuff.”

“Thanks for the suggestion, Reg, but sorry, that song sounds too much like the 70s, and we’re a new millennium kind of church. Know what I mean?”

Call me Rodney King, but I continually ask myself, “Why can’t we all just get along?” In the Spring 1998 Reformed Quarterly, RTS/Orlando Professor Mike Glodo wrote eloquently of the beauty of the Singing Savior of Psalm 22, of the fact that Jesus sang once and for all Israel’s lament of abandonment (the first half of Psalm 22), so we could sing the victory chant of redemption (the second half of Psalm 22).

I, too, am captivated by the vision of Christ now leading worship in the church, fulfilling the promise of Psalm 22:22: “I will declare Your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will sing a hymn to you” (see Hebrews 2:12). Maybe it is simply because I know how hard it is for certain kinds of people to consider singing alongside certain other kinds of people, but I am especially taken with the fact that it is specifically “in the assembly” that the psalmist locates the Savior’s singing.

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WHOSE SONG SHOULD WE SING?

What stands out about the exaltation of the Singing Savior in the second half of Psalm 22 is the description of the “great assembly” (v. 25) in which the Former Sufferer sings His hymn to the God who answers His cry for help. Having once been surrounded in His agony by a band of evildoers, now the Singer is surrounded by both Jew (v. 23) and Gentile (v. 27), by both poor (v. 26) and rich (v. 29a), and by both generations past (v. 29b) and generations to come (vv. 30-31). In place of God’s abandonment is His renewed gaze and listening ear (v. 24), and in place of the scoffers and torturers is a vast and variegated assembly.

Isn’t it remarkable that this is the answer to Messiah’s loneliness on the cross? The promise of the Singing Savior’s reveling in the company of a naturally disparate but now gathered people is a large part of “the joy set before Him” and which enabled Him to endure the shame of the cross (Hebrews 12:2). “Descendants of Jacob glorify Him … All the families of the earth worship you” (Psalm 22:23b, 27b). “The afflicted poor eat and are satisfied…The rich ones of the earth will eat and worship” (vv. 26a, 29a). Because His death and resurrection, as William Billings penned, “burst the bonds of death,” Jesus’ community does not recognize the boundary of death itself. Jesus leads even the dead and the unborn in their worship of the Father:

All those who go down to the dust bow before Him,
Even he who cannot keep his soul alive.
A seed will serve Him;
It will be told to a coming generation.
They will come and declare His righteousness
To a people who will be born, that He has done this (vv. 29b-31).

The presence of so many different kinds of worshipers in the Singing Savior’s great assembly cannot help but raise pressing questions about what — or better, whose — aesthetic governs their worship.

When the descendants of Jacob/Israel join the Savior’s song and “glorify” God and express their “awe” of Him (v. 23), what musical language do they use? When “all the ends of the earth” and “all the families of the earth” hear in the Savior’s song a remembrance of the image they were made to bear (v. 27), and thus turn to the Lord, with what musical tongue do they worship?

When the poor who seek the Lord eat alongside the rich at the Lord’s table (vv. 26,29), with whose tongue do they offer their common praise and worship? And when those who have already gone to the dust bow before the One whose death has secured their resurrection (v. 29), do they sing the same song in the same way as the people who are yet to be born but who will nonetheless themselves hear of the accomplishment of the same righteousness for them (vv. 30-31)?

Let me suggest that every group brings its own voice, but no group brings the official voice. One Voice sings above them all, and this Voice sings in all their voices, excluding none. His singular voice is distributed among a plurality of people. Just because there are so many dimensions to His own being, the multiplicity of their voices amplifies His song.

WHAT SONGS DOES JESUS SING?

Jesus sings the Hebrew songs of covenant faithfulness, giving “the Israel of God” the right, at long last, to name the name latent in the old covenant’s psalms of anticipation. Jesus is the True Vine — that is to say, He is True Israel. It is His death for sin that Israel’s and Judah’s exiles had pictured.

It is His resurrection and ascension that their homecomings had forecast. The theme “from shame to glory” is not just the story of Psalm 22. It is the story of the Psalter itself, moving as it does from Book 1’s plaintive songs of David in the wilderness (Psalms 1-41) to Book 5’s songs celebrating in advance an ultimate and final Davidic rule, that of Messiah (Psalms 107-150). “From shame to glory” is Israel’s and Judah’s career because it is Jesus’ career.

That is why on a number of occasions New Testament writers can summarize the whole of the Old Testament story as a foreshadowing of the sufferings and resurrection of Messiah (Luke 24:27,44-47; Acts 26:22-23; 1 Peter 1:10-12). In the church, Jesus sings the sweet song of salvation, the song of God’s faithfulness to His promises to bring His people home by way of His own suffering for them.

Jesus also sings folk idioms from “all the families of the earth,” purging the idolatrous and focusing the yearning for redemption that shows up wherever the imago Dei bears the kiss of common grace. From the very start, Jesus’ ministry displayed an outwardboundness that was scandalous to His own kin. He had the nations in view from start to finish — that is who He is: God’s heart for all the families of the earth.

What I believe we have seen in twenty centuries of church music is Christ calling forth His song from every culture His gospel has touched. Even when believers attempt distinctly “Christian” music, their music invariably bears the marks of their social world, and indeed would be incomprehensible without those marks. Elizabeth I could mock “Geneva jigs” precisely because many of the psalm settings emanating from Calvin’s church sounded like the dance songs for which Continental European troubadours were famous. Jesus sings God’s covenantal faithfulness and the width of His mercy in as many musical dialects as there are peoples who embrace Him.

Jesus sings with the voice of the refined, the illuminati, the cultured — “the rich,” who tend to be the sponsors of any society’s “high art.” The very Logos of God and agent of creation, Jesus Himself vastly outstrips the most elegant, the most intellectually rigorous and challenging — and the most passionately romantic — aesthetic expressions of worship imaginable.

Jesus loves Bach’s music, of this I am certain. I am equally sure, however, that he finds Bach’s (and all his aesthetic kin’s) most elevated and demanding stuff to be but nursery tunes. I even suspect that he Himself prompts the children of Jubal (see Genesis 4:21), the mad geniuses outside the believing community — the Beethovens, the Wagners, the Mahlers, the Bernsteins — to push the musical frontiers further out so the church can follow and learn new textures, tone colors, rhythms, harmonic combinations, and melodic possibilities.

Jesus sings with all the grit and earthiness, with all the directness and rhythms of the “working poor” (this is how the Greek Old Testament translates Psalm 22:26). Though His lineage was royal, Jesus’ upbringing was anything but that. He grew up in Galilee, a region with, at least by the standards of the refined Jerusalem elite, an embarrassingly high “Bubba-factor.” He was raised in an artisan’s home, and His parables depicted God’s kingdom in terms that debtors, day laborers, fishermen, and prostitutes could follow. When His disciples became leaders of the Jerusalem church, they were treated as country bumpkins (Acts 4:13). Paul, though himself a man of some upbringing (Acts 21:39; 22:3,27,28), despised the social snobbery of the relatively affluent Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).

The hints the New Testament gives us of early Christians’ worship are not pretentious or ostentatious, or even artistically demanding. Musical historians, such as John S. Andrews in an article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, suggest that early Christian music developed not from classical Greek music, but from more popular forms. It was poetic koine: “He was manifest in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, beheld by the angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16).

Most Christians that I know would probably think of themselves as musical “Bubbas,” of neither rarified tastes nor extraordinary ability. Know what? Jesus sings the simple songs — some of His best music is functional rather than pretty. It is enjoyed more from the inside than the outside, that is, in being done rather than in being listened to. And it points to God’s transcendence via simplicity rather than via complexity.

Jesus sings among the saints who have gone before, “the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven … and the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). His community is not limited by death, and neither is His song. The book of Revelation tells us that heaven’s current worship uses the same dynamic that we now know on earth. On the one hand, the martyrs cry out “How long, O Lord?” (Revelation 6:9-11), and on the other, they already (in my understanding) participate in “the first resurrection,” and rule and serve as priests alongside Christ during the present era of gospel victory (Revelation 20:4-6).

Some liturgies preserve the ancient prayer, “And so we join our voices … with all the company of heaven, who forever sing this hymn: Holy, holy, holy, God of power and might …” This expression of the living connection between the church in heaven and the church on earth is entirely correct. As G.K. Chesterton acutely observes, honoring tradition is how we give the dead their voice in our community. And that is important, because their voice is a part of Jesus’ voice.

Jesus sings among the yet-to-be born, those who will receive the word themselves, make it their own, give it their own voice, and then faithfully pass it to the generation following in their wake. In the 2nd century, an anonymous Roman Christian commended Jesus to a pagan friend named Diognetus. He told Diognetus that Jesus was “from of old,” but because He is alive now and is born in our hearts, He is also “forever young.”

In point of fact, Jesus came as the harbinger of a whole new creation. In His coming as the Second Adam — as the founder of a new human race — the future has invaded the present. Accordingly, Christ’s ongoing, eschatological presence in the church is necessarily fresh, intense, and unsettlingly forward-thrusting.

Every musical groove we establish is a potential rut. Every way of worshiping is a potential object of worship. And so every generation is like the Blues Brothers. Remember the movie? Jake and Elwood’s music was rooted in a heritage (soul music), but they were on a “mission from God” to save the orphanage in which they had been raised, that is, to take care of the next generation. In the process, they broke a lot of rules. Like them, we are called to do the best we can with the musical idioms we have inherited to help the next generation hear the Savior’s song and take up their own voice in response.

IT’S ABOUT HIS SONG, NOT OURS

When seen in the light of the person of Jesus, the church’s Lead Worshiper, our squabbles over how to do it right — which group’s aesthetic will be honored, and which group’s dishonored — take on their true measure: they are pathetically small-minded.

While we try to pare His song down to a manageable repertoire, He is expanding it. While we are doing market research to decide whom we want to reach and, therefore, to whose aesthetic tastes we want to pander, the Singing Savior is distributing His magnificent voice across an increasingly wide spectrum of musical idioms. While we are dividing congregations along age lines, He is blending the songs of generations and nations and families and tribes and tongues to make sweet harmony, precisely through the differences, to the Father.

The day has come for us to mute our provincial songs, and start listening for His voice, for it is “like the sound of many waters” (Revelation 1:15), as rich and complex as the constitution of His people.

Jesus’ voice is what counts, not ours. And His is the voice of the Jew and the Gentile, the poor and the rich, those who have already had their say and those who have not yet even come into being. There is a unity and diversity in the voices of His assembly which we may not be able to hold together on our own, but which the Risen Christ, because He is literally and vibrantly present among us, can.

This article originally appeared in the RTS Reformed Quarterly, Summer 1999

I’m grateful to Thomas Howard for Dove Descending, his commentary on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” But why must Eliot be so pointedly obtuse as to need line-by-line decoding? (Though I suspect some of my students would think I find in Eliot a kindred spirit.) Having forced my way through “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” and “Wasteland” last week, I’m ready for some words of redemption. I’m just getting started on “Four Quartets” — I love the notion of there being “a way up that is at one and the same time a way down,” but this poetry is tough going. (I hope I can get some help from Charlie Kidd when he returns from abroad.)

Last week while grading exams (almost done), I listened several times (and am doing so even now) to Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. The Alpine Symphony, a tribute to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, makes Nietzsche’s atheism (or at least his quest for a “nobler god”) feel so, I dunno, so what? Brave?

Then again, if your best hope is to have your ashes parked on the top of the Himalayas in a Chock Full o’Nuts can (per The Bucket List, which movie Shari sat me down to watch this weekend, and which movie felt to me like an extended commentary on how to make Nietzsche work for you — even if the main characters do make non-Nietzschean moves toward relationships), you move past bravery into, well, again, what?

OK, I guess it makes a pretty big difference whether there’s a Redeemer or not. If not, The Bucket List is about as close to redemption as you’re going to get, I suppose. That said, I’m not sure a bucket list isn’t a bad idea even if (or since) there is a Redeemer.

What could be on mine? I’ve already killed a gator, hit a home run, played Bach & B.B. King, swung a samurai sword, driven (even briefly owned) a muscled up Mustang, kissed the most beautiful girl in the world, raised with her the three most vibrantly alive sons ever, written more than I have the right to expect anybody to read, spoken truth into the lives of half a generation of seminarians, seen tons of the majestic …

Before we leave Strauss, his Also Sprach Zarathustra (the whole tone poem) has inspired me to try to get the “Prelude” into my fingers on my Lucille and out through my Fender tube amps.

My head still hurts (that good hurt when your head feels like it’s taken in more than it’s able) from how rich the Institute for Worship Studies experience was this session. I’m grateful especially for bold prayers and wise counsel I received, and for the self-giving love I witnessed among strong-willed and talented worship leaders. It’s curious that my teaching partner and I are going through such parallel dysfunctions in church life. I love the church so — may all of us who love the Groom and his Bride help each other help Her not dress so ugly. I hold much promise of Her better adornment through my IWS friends.

Like I said, random thoughts … but, hey, it’s my blog.

Note to both devoted readers: I won’t forget about the other seven reasons for samurai sword training in Japan.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. • T. S. Eliot

Well, how about some perspective?

OK, those little chores aren’t hanging over my head any more. That’s a pretty good thing. One less drain on the battery.

Plus, on reflection, it was great to be reminded that, recent setbacks notwithstanding, I am still able to afford a few simple pleasures, like the music of John Tavener and the prose of Wendell Berry. More, paying off reimbursements from preaching and worship leading at Lookout Mtn. Pres. two weekends ago brought refreshing memories of a healing time with old and new friends.

Reliving last weekend’s sword tournament gave me one more opportunity to give thanks that Randy has found something he does remarkably well … as well as one more opportunity to give thanks that, as event registrar, I’m learning to serve outside my area of gifting.

Recalling last weekend’s tournament also gave pause to consider what a “ruinous visitation” it was for my sensei’s sensei to expose a glaring flaw in my suihe (side to side cut) and to observe that I didn’t know yet how to aim the sword accurately. Change or die, for sure. (Learning how to accept “ruinous visitations” will have to become a chapter in the book: Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Coaching Little League, Training Dogs, or Submitting to a Samurai Sword Sensei.)

Moreover, I did get a couple of hours in Scripture yesterday … with no “preparation agenda” … just getting caught up in the flow of the narrative in Numbers and Mark. That was pretty cool.

I did get to talk with Bob and Charlie (yesterday was his 21st, and his first Newcastle), and wish them well on their spring break trek to MS to do Katrina relief work. That was pretty cool too.

Randy and I did get to cut some pool noodles. My new Hataya Wakizashi is absolutely amazing. Beyond cool.

And Shari and I did get to consider together that in a world that Ecclesiastes describes so keenly, nonetheless God is at work … and in his time and in his way, he will make all things right. Way beyond cool.

This Lenten season is providing a remarkable opportunity to rediscover the wonder of what was redeemed — from the brutally painful to the mind-numbingly mundane:

In a grave they laid you, O my Life and my Christ;
and the armies of the angels were sore amazed
as they sang the praise of your submissive love.

O Life, how can you die? Or abide in a grave?
For You destroy the Kingdom of death, O Lord,
and you raise up the dead of Hades’ realm.

John Tavener, Lamentations & Praises

In the Bible things are sweet and beautiful and good for all of two chapters. The rest of the book is colored by the unspeakable ugliness and uncleanness that intrude when Adam & Eve take the Serpent’s bait. From here on, the book is about the re-flowering of a deflowered race.

I love Easter. From Christ’s resurrection, death begins working backward — deaths are undied, treacheries reversed, whores re-virgined, wallflowers dragged onto the dance floor.

But as much as I love Easter, I have a special fondness for the few days before. Days in which we reconnect with the barbaric Christ — who came to best our ugliness by becoming disfigured, our bestiality by “becoming sin,” and our emptiness by hanging in utter nakedness.

In With One Voice I wrote about the way that Good Friday services at Northland (A Church Distributed, in Longwood, FL), the church of my first twelve years here in Central FL, sustained me during those years. Services that simply and starkly rehearsed Jesus’s seven words from the cross, the lights dimming a bit with each saying, until the lights went out with, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” Then lights coming up with the Apostles Creed’s, “… and on the third day …” By taking me into Jesus’s holy darkness, those services made his victory over the grave the more palpable to me.

In my five years at Orangewood Presbyterian (Maitland, FL), our senior pastor, Jeff Jakes, has urged this congregation to make our lives about “Christ and his Kingdom — it’s not about us.” It’s been nothing short of astounding to watch people “get it.” These people have built and restored houses. Suburbanites have gone into places of ministry that are not comfortable — and have stayed there. They go to Mexico and Turkey to support in person missionaries they support with their checkbooks. Twice in this past week individuals have told me about how well loved they have been: one who’s critically ill and who has had Orangewood people take him in, another whose marriage is crumbling but who has found church people acting like family. Week after week these folks set up and tear down a gym so it can become a sanctinasium. Week after week they take turns watching each other’s little ones so young moms & dads can worship. Week after week they honor each other’s wildly different tastes in worship music (we don’t do apartheid worship).

Because of the journey we’ve been on, this year we thought our Maundy Thursday service should put the “Maundy” back into Maundy Thursday. “Maundy,” after all, comes from “mandate” — it recalls the “new commandment” Jesus gives his disciples in John 13:34-35 to love one another the way he has loved them. How has he loved them? He’s just shown them, by wrapping himself in a servant’s towel and taken up a servant’s basin to wash their feet (Jn 13:1-17). To make the point as clear as he possibly can he has said, “… so ought you to do for one another” (Jn 13:15).

So, we thought, “Maybe it’s time we do what he told us to do.”

This year the pastors, elders, deacons, and some of the leading women of the church invited the congregation to allow their leadership to wash their feet: tokens of the kind of self-giving love Jesus embodied from incarnation to crucifixion, expressions of the church’s thanks for the lives of footwashing going on in our midst, and tangible urgings to do so all the more.

I’ll carry memories of this service with me for a long time. The most vivid was that of one of our elders — an exceedingly, exceedingly successful businessman who must wear his suit, starched white shirt and power tie in the shower — on his knees (in his suit, starched white shirt and power tie) on the one portion of our floor that was soaking wet because of a leaky basin. I caught him looking into the eyes of one of our middle schoolers, just getting her name so she could be reminded that Jesus loves her personally.

In her blog, Amy Pitsch shares some of her reactions — the discomfort she had to overcome was just like mine when a number of years ago I found myself unexpectedly dragged into my first footwashing.

As I write on Holy Saturday (listening to the Tavener-&-Mahler-&-Penderecki-laced soundtrack to Children of Men) my heart is full of grateful wonder. I marvel at the beautification of the ugly that was played out with basin and towel 2,000 years ago. And I resolve to take up my basin and towel because of the promise that one day the power of humility over pride, of love over hate, of lowliness over haughtiness, will re-light the globe, and the glory of Christ and his Father will outshine the sun itself.

“Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Alleluia! Alleluia!! Alleluia!!!”

Recently and unexpectedly, God allowed me a special hearing of each of those voices.

• Bach’s Voice: The Gloriae Dei Cantores
• Bubba’s Voice: “Life is Like a Mountain Railroad”
• The Blues Brothers’ Voice: U2’s Vertigo Tour

A few Saturday nights ago, the Gloriae Dei Cantores, (GDC) offered a free concert at 1st Presbyterian Church in downtown Orlando (sponsored by United Arts of Central FL [UACFL], and others). The Gloriae Dei Cantores (= “Singers to the Glory of God”) are a splendid sacred music choir from Cape Cod, MA. High points of the GDC program were pieces by composers new to me: Samuel Adler’s “Psalm 146” (Oh, did Ps 146 dance!), Bruce Neswick’s “I Will Set His Dominion in the Sea” (powerful organ, soaring voices), and William Matthias’s suite Rex Gloriae (”Sing praise with joy, you mountains, for our Lord will come, and he will be merciful to his poor”).

In With One Voice, I write about the way “Bach’s voice” (classical music in service of Christ) promotes, what, in the spirit of Aristotle, I call “greatness of soul” and, in the spirit of Paul, “the weight of glory.” That night in Orlando , I heard Jesus singing “Bach’s voice” full-throated, and I felt greatness of soul.

That same night the Doobie Brothers were giving a free open air concert a couple of blocks away — there’s a sermon somewhere in that juxtaposition! I walked out of the building onto a street reverberating with the Doobie Brothers’ question: “Without love, where would you be right now?” Indeed, without the Savior’s love, where? And without brothers and sisters like the members of the Gloriae Dei Cantores, how could we hear his splendid song of love?

Not long after that, I took my 80 something year old mother to East Tennessee to visit my father’s burial site. Hosting us was my favorite cousin, Frank Kidd, retired educator and lover of Jesus. He was ebullient about his recent trek to Greenville , SC , for the Southern Gospel awards ceremony. I think our relationship went to a new plateau on this trip, because he played me two recordings of his all-time favorite hymn, “Life is like a mountain railroad, with an Engineer that’s brave” — one version by Patsy Cline, the other by Burl Ives. I had no idea this earthy sort of music touched my cousin’s spirit so. It was unimaginably endearing — his love for the song and for the way it made him love more earnestly the brave Engineer of his soul — well, it was irresistible. Jesus grew up in Palestine ‘s equivalent of East Tennessee . He was an artisan’s son who got dirt under his fingernails — and he’s not above the simplest of songs. I rejoiced to hear Him sing Bubba to my cousin’s soul.

And then, just to round out some sort of cosmic dance and thanks to my friend Greg Davis , I unexpectedly got to take in U2’s Vertigo Tour in Miami last week. A transcendent experience in many respects. Adam (bass) and Larry (drums) lay down such a solid, tight foundation — though he might never warm up to the idiom, Bach would appreciate the language. The Edge plays a lead/rhythm guitar that to me is the rock equivalent of Arvo Pärt’s chiming “tintinabulli” — ethereal and soul-piercing all at once.

Bono embodies his own musings about David being “the Elvis of the bible” [sic]: “unlike most rock stars, he had the humility of one who knew his gift worked harder than he ever would.”

F-bombs aside, here’s a voice that knows it’s been given a gift, and has accepted the gift as a stewardship and a call to service. So Bono’s not afraid to say thanks to folks “for standing in line, and giving us such a great life.” And rather than using his platform to glorify Ego or Bacchus, he calls a generation (actually, a couple of generations) to live for something more, and to unite around things that should concern people “in coliseums and churches — rock stars and preachers, right and left.”

Remarkably, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” isn’t just Ireland ‘s song; in a world of suicide bombers, it’s America ‘s (and Iraq ‘s and Israel ‘s?) song. And with slave trafficking in Asia and AIDS in Africa, “Love and Peace or Else” and “Miss Sarajevo” aren’t just America ‘s songs, they’re the world’s. I wish churches — for Christ’s sake! — could tap into the eagerness U2 senses in their audience to have more than Ego or Bacchus to live for. Here’s Jesus’s Blues Brothers voice (popular music in the service of Christ) — music that’s rooted simultaneously in a larger, ancient story and in its own culture.

Yeah, OK, I was hoping for the concert to end with the prayer songs “Yahweh” and “40” (as happens often on the Vertigo tour, and as captured on the Chicago DVD). Still, when the band walked off after (a drop dead gorgeous acoustic version of) “Walk On” and “Bad,” leaving the crowd chanting “People got the power,” I still felt like I could hear “a real though far off song that hails a new creation.”