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.

Just as I was ordering my Big Mac, a woman came into McDonald’s yanking on the arm of a young child. Ugliness leaped from this slovenly woman. Dragging on a cigarette butt, she yelled at her kid: “Shut up and tell me what you want to eat, or I’m going to kick you from here to Kingdom come!”

But then I noticed this distinctive shape to her face …

Suddenly, I realized this face was identical to that of one of the prostitutes French artist Georges Rouault had once painted. This woman could have served as his model.

Dark Times

Though he lived from 1871 to 1958, Rouault’s most notable working years spanned WWI and WWII. Many artists of his day heard in the turmoil of their times the death-knell of Christendom and of the Christian faith. For Rouault, though, the times were proof of our need for Christ.

His art became the means of bringing together God’s story and our pain.

As a teen, Rouault had apprenticed as a stained glass artisan. He learned to tell a story through simplicity of line and color. In his early adult years he studied the realistic technique of Rembrandt, in quest of that master’s psychological depth. Rouault’s early work, not surprisingly, reveals an artist who has not yet found his voice.

Then, around 1903 when Rouault was in his early 30’s, he had a happenstance encounter with an off-duty clown. Everything changed. It is the moment, as he puts it, “that marked the beginnings of poetry in my life.”

Self Portraits

Rouault comes upon this old clown “mending his glittering and colorful costume.” He sees the jarring contrast of “brilliant, scintillating things, made to amuse us,” on the one hand, and the infinite sadness in the man’s unguarded face, on the other.

I clearly saw that the “Clown” was me, it was us. … This rich and spangled costume is given to us by life, we are all clowns more or less, we all wear a “spangled costume,” but if we are caught unawares, as I surprised the old clown, oh! Then who would dare to say that he is not moved to the bottom of his being by immeasurable pity.

Rouault begins to paint pictures that tell us the truth about ourselves: sorrowful clowns (“Who does not paint himself a face?”), imperious kings (“We think we are kings…”), self-absorbed bourgeoisie (“The well-bred lady thinks she has a reserved seat in heaven.”)

He drops his realistic technique for the look of the stained glass of his youth: thick, simple lines. Vivid colors. Simple but penetrating truths about ourselves.

Stained glass is above all the church’s art. Here’s where Rouault’s art becomes poetry. He uses his stained glass effect because, in pity, he would point us to Jesus, to him who had become “like us in all things, save sin” so he could redeem and heal us. In Rouault’s hands, one portrait of Christ looks as ugly as the sinners with whom he identifies, while another portrait is iconically transcendent, a promise of peace and resurrection.

Deeper Similarities

Standing at that McDonalds counter, I realized that despite all that made us different, this woman and I were the same. Same ugliness. Same dignity and beauty for which we were created, but from which we have fallen so hopelessly and seemingly irrevocably.

Then came the epiphany, unbidden. In a flash, I recalled Rouault’s famous Head of Christ. I think it was the shape of the jaw. In my imagination, the woman’s face morphed, first, to that of Rouault’s sad, angry prostitute, then second, to his sadder, compassionate Christ.

Art of any sort — from painting to music to worship design — has this extraordinary power: it can bring a whispered promise or a shouted call from another realm. The incarnation itself brings, after all, God’s permanent residence in our reality.

Rouault’s portrait of the prostitute said: “Doesn’t she look a lot like you and me?” His portrait of Christ said: “Didn’t he come for the likes of her and you and me?”

I should have talked to this “Fallen Eve” (a term Rouault sometimes used). But the words wouldn’t come. All I knew to do in that moment was pray: “Lord, have mercy. On her. On me. On this sad world you love. In your own time and in your own way, show yourself to this dear child of yours, and save her. And Lord, forgive my blindness to what, or rather Who, makes us one.” I pray for her still.

Click for subscription information for Worship Leader Magazine.

Also I’m pondering what the French Catholic artist Georges Rouault has taught me about God’s wedding of medium and message. About a Christ who came bearing the likeness of angry prostitutes, sorrowful clowns, proud kings, imperious judges, self-feeding shepherds.

“Then in the fullness of time,
out of your great love for the world,
you sent your only Son to be one of us,
to redeem us and heal our brokenness.”

• From the Great Thanksgiving (Book of Common Worship).

]]> http://reggiekidd.com/RK/2009/06/23/currently-pondering-frame-rouault-medium-message/feed/ 6 http://reggiekidd.com/RK/2009/05/01/synchronicity-rediscovering-the-trinity-and-spirit-filled-worship/ http://reggiekidd.com/RK/2009/05/01/synchronicity-rediscovering-the-trinity-and-spirit-filled-worship/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 13:09:32 +0000 Administrator http://reggiekidd.com/RK/2009/05/01/synchronicity-rediscovering-the-trinity-and-spirit-filled-worship/ With the 1st of May, comes  a new issue of Worship Leader Magazine, for whom I’ve been a columnist since the first of the year. The lead article this issue happens to be mine, a meditation on the Holy Spirit’s role in worship. To read the whole article, of course, you have to subscribe. But here’s the Introduction, Headings (with summaries), and the Conclusion:

One minute the puppy was playing on the side of the street. The next, he darted into traffic. That was it. I saw him spin off a passing car’s wheel and collapse in a lump at the side of the road. A police officer happened by and stopped to see if he could help. I expected him to feel for a heartbeat. Instead, he took off his sunglasses and held them to the puppy’s nose.

“No breath,” he said to me, “he’s gone. Poor guy.”

Worship Leaders and the Spirit — Leading worship is the privilege it is because it amounts to cooperating with the life-giving Holy Spirit.

The One Worship Leader and the Spirit — Jesus cleanses the Temple as a sign that his sacrifice will end sacrifices, and as a sign that He is going to build a new building, one made of us.

The Spirit in John’s Gospel — Jesus’ sayings and conversations in John’s gospel give us a glimpse into the vision that animated Jesus that day he cleansed the Temple.

The Holy Spirit and Worship — What characterizes Spirit-led worship? Are there marks of the breath of the Spirit?

The Spirit Creates Life — G. K. Chesterton suggests that the only way to explain the fact that the church hasn’t died over time as one cultural, political, or philosophical support after another has fallen away, is that there is a Presence in the church that won’t go away. If Arianism, Gnosticism, Pelagianism, imperial patronage, humanism, scientism, modernism, and postmodernism can’t make the Holy Spirit go away, I probably can’t either.

The Spirit Makes One out of Many — Unity is not difficult to sustain when everyone shares the same preferences – musical tastes, “age and stage” affinity, theological nuance, Myers-Briggs profiles. When there’s unity despite differing penchants, a unity that is born out of heroic forbearance and costly deference, it seems more likely that it is the Spirit who is at work.

The Spirit Exalts Others — A fundamental characteristic of the Holy Spirit is that he does not call attention to himself: “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you,” said Jesus (John 14:16).

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Of course, there’s so much more to say about the Spirit and worship — about the mission, about the gifts, about uniting old and new. But for now, this will have to suffice: not unlike that lifeless puppy I saw on the side of the road, we were dead to intimacy with our Maker, and dead to the way our relationships with one another were to mirror the eternal communion within the Trinity — until the Son came, died, rose, and breathed the breath of God into us.

As a worship leader there’s probably nothing greater that I can contribute to worship than making sure that I keep breathing God’s breath myself. In the Word daily — breathe in. In prayer daily — breathe out. Confess “my stuff” — breathe in. Lift his name in praise and adoration — breathe out. Come to the Table — breathe in. Wish my neighbor Christ’s peace — breathe out. Ponder the wonder of his grace to me — breathe in. Find the lost, tell the story, feed the hungry — breathe out.

]]> http://reggiekidd.com/RK/2009/05/01/synchronicity-rediscovering-the-trinity-and-spirit-filled-worship/feed/ 3 http://reggiekidd.com/RK/2009/04/11/favorite-quotes-christus-victor-and-the-making-new-of-all-things/ http://reggiekidd.com/RK/2009/04/11/favorite-quotes-christus-victor-and-the-making-new-of-all-things/#comments Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:59:16 +0000 Administrator http://reggiekidd.com/RK/2009/04/11/favorite-quotes-christus-victor-and-the-making-new-of-all-things/

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.

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.

For the rest of the article, please click:

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

If Jesus died and rose again it means every one of us is heading for one of two destinations, according to C. S. Lewis: being “immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

My friend Greg Davis lost his battle with esophageal cancer this week. But he won a more significant campaign. Greg loved Jesus. And Greg lived as though he weren’t just returning to dirt. He lived as though he were destined to become an everlasting splendour.

I’ve known few people as gifted in so many areas — and so unwilling to trumpet his abilities. Raised in Liberia by missionaries from the U.S. (his dad was a bush pilot), Greg responded to God’s call to the nations by equipping himself for ministry and going to Ireland as a missionary. When his marriage fell apart and he found himself a single dad, he took up counseling. His pastoring was characterized by an unusual capacity to care for the discarded and ignored — thus, I think, our mutual love for French artist Georges Rouault.

Along the way Greg found he had a knack for photography and for wordsmithing — so he published a book of his photos and poems, Windows of the Heart: Poetry & Photographs (Writers Press, 2002). Because nobody else around him seemed to understand how to make their computers work, he learned “information technology” (even figuring how PCs work — to Greg, that anybody would use anything but a Mac was proof of radical depravity). Though he felt his IT ability was as much a curse as a gift, he gave himself selflessly to helping others use digital technology (“Well, the basic reason your computer’s not working is that it’s not plugged in”).

A couple of months after I started leading worship at Orangewood, I felt it was time to bring a little art into our “sanctinasium” (sanctuary/gymnasium/school auditorium). It’s one thing for reformed people to have a lean aesthetic — but gym aesthetics are beyond lean. I’d say more like off-puttingly utilitarian — without even the hauntingly mysterious potential of catacombs. In support of lyrics that particular Sunday I projected some art I use in classroom teaching, and I did so with a singular set of fears: that the congregation would find the art helpful but me unable to find the time to provide the art from week to week. “Lord, I offer this to you — but if it’s going to be more than a one shot deal, you’re going to have to do something.”

No sooner did the service end than a short, bald, bearded guy walked up to me: “Hey, I just started working at the church part-time in IT … but my real interest is art … if you have any interest in doing more of what you did this morning, I think I might be able to help.”

Little in ministry has given me more pleasure over the last four years than brainstorming with a gifted and godly worship team about how readings, segues, songs, prayers, sacraments and sermons can complement each other — and then sitting back to watch Greg create slide backgrounds, videos, poetry, and handouts to make a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. See his corpus at writeclik.com. His visual point of departure might be a Vermeer or a Rembrandt or a Rouault or a cathedral or a train station or a worked-metal cross atop an Istanbul church or a neon-lit cross in front of an Orlando rescue mission. His imaginative capacity and theological depth and biblical breath were astonishing. And his friendship irreplaceable.

A week before his death we sang, “Be Still My Soul,” and I could barely get through it because I knew my friend would soon be departing:

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on your side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
leave to your God to order and provide;
in ev’ry change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: your best, your heav’nly Friend
through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul: your God will undertake
to guide the future as He has the past.
Your hope, your confidence let nothing shake;
all now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know
His voice who ruled them while he dwelt below.

Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart,
and all is darkened in the vale of tears.
Then shall you better know his love, his heart,
who comes to soothe your sorrow and your fears.
Be still, my soul: your Jesus can repay
from His own fullness all He takes away.

Be still, my soul: the hour is hast’ning on
when we shall be forever with the Lord.
when disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past,
all safe and blessed we shall meet at last.

The second most enjoyable thing I’ve done in the last two years (the first was gator hunting last year) was going to the U2 Vertigo concert in Miami as Greg’s guest (thus the “vintage” post elsewhere on this site, “BB&BB: The Beat Goes On”). So I know the sign-off Greg would prefer is from his favorite Irish theologian, Bono:

Grace
It’s a name for a girl
It’s also a thought that changed the world.
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things.