Sermon 81 - Sing Praise Unto the Lord
Exodus 32:18
Moses replied: "It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear."
Judges 5:3
Hear this, you kings! Listen, you rulers! I, even I, will sing to the Lord; I will praise the Lord, the God of Israel, in song.
1 Chronicles 16:9
Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts.
Psalm 7:17
I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness; I will sing the praises of the name of the Lord Most High.
Psalm 96:1
Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.
Music has always been part of my life in the church. There was Sunday school. It's rather astounding. Some of these songs I was taught seventy years ago, and I still remember them. And it's amazing how appropriate they are. I remember a supposed contest at a theological seminary, where they had a summarize Barth contest. The winning entry was, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
Oh, I've got a million of them. Well, probably several dozen, anyway. And they'll still pop into my mind, at the oddest moments.
Then there were various children's choirs. And eventually youth choirs. Actually, I think that that is a significant advantage of taking your kids to church, and to Sunday school, these days. They learn to sing. (Well, not if they you just take them to church. The praise singing that goes on in church well, possibly the less said the better, and I'm going to be talking about that in a bit.) But children's choirs, yes. That is training and singing in choirs. And an awful lot of schools no longer have formal music programs. Or, if they do have formal music programs, the students who get to be involved in the music programs are those who already *know* how to sing. Those who know something about music. And if you came up through children's choirs, and then youth choirs, in the church, then you know how to sing. And you know how to read music. At least for the purposes of reading sheet song music. That's a big advantage in terms of getting into music programs. And having musical experience and ability is a big advantage in getting into drama programs. So, yes, take your children to church. Get them into the children's choirs. Insist that they continue on through the youth choirs. It will be a significant advantage later in life.
Of course, when I went to church we sang hymns. And that was an exercise in reading music as well. The hymnals usually didn't just have the words to the hymns, but the sheet music, or at least a very basic version of the sheet music that had the four-part harmony, included in the hymnal. Therefore, once again, you got practice in reading music. You got practice in singing harmony.
Okay, I can't stand it anymore. I'll have to talk about praise songs. Praise songs, well there's two things wrong with the praise songs. Well, maybe three. The first is that praise songs are contemporary music. They were written recently. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with music that was written recently. No, I am not going to say that nothing that was written after "Amazing Grace" has any musical quality. Some of the stuff that is written recently is good and inspiring. But some of it isn't. There's a reason that the classics are the classics. They have stood the test of time. Music that doesn't have any particular value, hymns that don't have any particular value, fall out of the hymnals along the way. What we get left over is the good stuff. My absolute favorite, of course, is "Of the Father's Love Begotten." This is not the oldest hymn that we know of. There are passages in Paul's letters which are almost certainly recitations of hymns and praise songs that were sung in Paul's time. So we know the words to some of these older hymns. But we don't know the music. "Of the Father's Love Begotten" is the oldest him that we actually do know the music. It goes back to around 500 AD. The song music that we have is certainly not written in modern notation, but it is enough that we know what the melody was for "Of the Father's Love Begotten."
And then there are so many hymns, that go back so far. "Oh Come All Ye Faithful." That's an English translation, of course. The original is in Latin, and is even slightly older than the English words. Adeste Fidelis. And then of course there is "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." Martin Luther's work. Martin Luther was big on contemporary writing his own contemporary music and him. He's definitely on your side in terms of wanting to have the music up to date and modern. "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" was up to date and modern when he did it. It's probably set to the tune of a bar room drinking song of the day.
(If you are an American, and perturbed at the mention of a bar room drinking song as the basis for the melody of one of the great hymns of the church, then you definitely don't want to know about the origin of your own national anthem.)
When I took Church history, our professor had a sing a hymn at the beginning of every lecture. The hymns that we sang, that he chose, were often representative of the time. That we were exploring as we went through the history of the Christian church. And there are so many wonderful hymns. Although, as he did point out, we do tend to sing more heresy than orthodoxy. But yes, there are wonderful old Christian hymns, and the hymns stay with you. There are two reasons for this: one is that you have the poetry and the music to cement the lyrics in your memory. But the second is that songs, and hymns, and praise songs, carry a very heavy emotional content. This tends to also cement them, very firmly, in your memory.
Anyway, you know that's the first reason why I like the old hymns. But there's a couple more reasons that I'm not particularly fond of the prevalence of praise songs in modern worship services.
So the second reason is, well, as one of my dear old friends calls it, praise songs tend to be 7/11 music. He uses the term 7-Eleven to indicate that these songs have the same seven words that get sung for eleven minutes. He's right. An awful lot of the modern praise songs have very little verbal content. The lyrics don't really deal with a lot of theology or religious ideas. Lest you think that I am exaggerating the idea of the same seven words being sung for eleven minutes, there is one praise song that contains, in total, four words. And on one occasion I heard a group of young people singing this song for fifteen minutes by my watch. I am not kidding, and I am not exaggerating. Four words. Fifteen minutes. I began to think that maybe they were starting up a new cult.
The third reason that I am concerned about the prevalence of praise songs in contemporary worship services is that praise songs tend to be performance songs. These are songs that the song leaders of today here either on radio stations or in other sources of popular music. Well, Christian contemporary music, anyway. And these songs are written, and sung, by professional performers. They tend to have a lot of bridges. They tend to have a lot of interludes. They tend to have long and varying endings, repeating sections of the lyrics that have been sung during the body of the song itself. The thing is that they are performed. They are performed by professional singers. The professional singers can do a really good job of them. Your common or garden Sunday morning congregation can't. They are not professionals. Not musical professionals, anyways. And they have a hard time with the complicated rhythms, changing key signatures, changing time signatures, and other flourishes that professional singers can get away with, but amateurs can't. So, if you pay attention, in Sunday morning services these days, you will notice that it is a performance, rather than a participation in praise. The worship team, up at the front, are doing their best to give us solid and professional performance, as they have heard on the version of the song they first heard wherever they first heard it. They are trying to reproduce the professional song and tone and style that was done by the professional musician. But that's a bridge too far for the congregation. So the praise team stands up at the front and sings, and the congregation stands, and, by and large, is silent. Oh yes, there are some in the congregation who are trying to sing along. They are trying to participate in worship. But certainly not everyone.
I don't stand up to sing anymore. I've got arthritis, and degenerating discs, and I am just, generally, old. My legs are weak, and standing, all through the praise time, it's difficult for me. Yes, I know, I always stood, all through my youth and middle years, singing in church. But that's because I was singing in church. When you are actually singing, you don't want to sit down. You don't want to have your diaphragm and your chest compressed. No, you want to stand. Standing allows you full expansion of your chest, and unimpeded operation of your diaphragm. But that's if you're singing. Since so many of the songs the praise songs are so difficult to sing, and I don't know them anyways, and they don't have harmony for me to sing in any case, I don't sing along anymore. So there is absolutely no reason for me to stand during the praise singing.
The church allowed me to practice music, and reading of music. And it was undoubtedly the church, and even the contemporary music that was available when I was a youth, that got me into collecting folk songs during the 1970s. And I sang folk songs in the coffee houses of the churches of that day. I collected folk songs, and I collected a lot of religious folk music. That was the style of music in those days. I believe that, somewhere, I still have my massive collection of contemporary Christian music from those days, possibly 1,000 songs that I collected at the time. So, once again, yes, getting your kids involved in music in the church getting your kids involved in music. They're just aren't any other opportunities to really participate in music in our society. Music is, more and more, performances by professionals, and listening by the rest of us. So participation in singing in the church is important. I'm somewhat disappointed that I don't get a chance to participate in singing in church anymore. But we all get old.
And then of course I met Gloria. Gloria was much more involved with music than I was. We did sing in the choir together, at one point. That was of course, back in the days when church is actually had choirs. And when I say sang in the choir with Gloria, of course, what I really mean is, that Gloria and I sang in the same choir. Gloria was in front row of the sopranos, I was in the back row of the basses.
Gloria was also the featured soloist frequently. I was in the back row with the bases.
Gloria first appeared off stage with a solo part at the age of nine. By the age of twelve, Gloria knew that her voice was a gift for from God and it was to be used in God's service. She was quite well aware of her responsibilities, as a frequent soloist in the church. She knew to develop a pleasant resting face. In order to present a pleasant face to the congregation when she wasn't actually doing anything in particular on stage. This became so entrenched that, when she was walking down the street, people would frequently smile at her, thinking that she had first been smiling at them. No, not necessarily: that was just Gloria's pleasant resting face.
There were, of course, those of lesser talent who were jealous of Gloria's gift, status, and position. However, it is interesting to note that certain people didn't want her to sing for completely different reasons. There was one minister whom we both knew. He had been headhunted, and recruited, from a seminary in the United Kingdom. He was a man of status and stature himself. I remember, myself, stocking the house for himself and his family as he was due to arrive in Canada, and including a number of items that I knew were available in the United Kingdom, but could only be found in specialty stores here in Canada. He flatly refused to have Gloria sing in a service where he was presenting the sermon. His explanation of this was that Gloria's voice, and her songs, were so elevating that he didn't know how to get, in his words, "people down off the ceiling," after Gloria had delivered a solo. I always wondered about that response. Why would you want to get them down off the ceiling?
Music is an integral part of praise and worship. It is important to the church. I dare say one could make the point that it is important to our Christian life, overall. Singing solos in the church can be used to present a new point of view, very strongly. Music, as I have noted, carries emotion with it. It is not just the lyrics, although even the poetry of the lyrics can have its own effect. The music itself carries an emotional component that goes beyond the mere words that we may say or recite from scriptures. This emotional component is vitally important to our worship and our experience of coming to meet with God in the service.
Music, and the choice of music, can frequently be divisive in the church. Once again, this is likely because music has such a heavy emotional characteristic. People want to preserve the music that they most appreciate, whether this is the old classic hymns, or the new contemporary praise songs. Everyone has their favorites, and wants to know that their favorites can be played as often as possible.
Hopefully we can accept the choices of others in regard to the music in the church. After all, if we continue to insist on a steady diet of our old favorites, we may miss the opportunity to find new favorites among the more contemporary music that might be presented. I also note that a number of the old classics are coming back. This time presented as new, when an old hymn is presented with a new chorus or bridge, and delivered to us as an entirely new product, without realizing that it has been around, possibly for hundreds of years.
Sing praise unto the Lord. However old or new.
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