How the Prayers of Others Help the Worship-Challenged

Interesting reflection from Stanley Hauerwas:

The worship of God does not come naturally to me, as it seems to for some. I live most of my life as if God does not exist. Yet I know I would not have survived without the prayers of friends who have learned to pray the prayers of the church. My life depends on learning to worship God with those who have made it possible for me to go on. Through worship, the world learns the truth that is required for our being truthful about ourselves and one another.

Two key themes emerge in that paragraph: 

1. For many of us not so gifted, the prayers of others are necessary to sustain and shape our own prayers. 

2. Worship is about truth (see John 4:23-24). In worship we encounter the one who is the Truth, we hear both the good news and the bad news about our own condition, and we learn to be truthful by proclaiming the truth. 

In the end, it is because of the rough confrontation with the truth that we know we need the prayers of others.

The quotation is from Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), p. 159. Read more!

Out of the Miry Clay

KANSAS CITY—In England, worshipers influenced by the charismatic renewal have been derided as “happy clappy.” With its roots 40 years ago in the Jesus Movement’s marriage of rock-n-roll and charismatic faith, you might expect the National Worship Leader Conference—with its theme of “Sing a New Song”—to kick off with rambunctious exuberance.

Instead, the conference opened last night on a somber note, with Tennessee pastor Steve Berger reflecting on the pain of having to bury his 19-year-old son just two years ago. For the keynote address, Berger exposited Psalm 40:1-3, one of nine Scripture passages that use the phrase “new song.” The psalm is a narrative prayer that begins with the psalmist’s experience of despair—of being in “an horrible pit” and stuck in “miry clay.” But by waiting patiently upon the Lord, the Psalmist says, he was taken from the pit and the mire and had his feet set “upon a rock” and had “a new song” placed in his mouth.

Berger stressed the pit as the location from which we learn the “new song” (which Berger defined as “a fresh experience with an ancient truth”). Those who want, with the apostle Paul, to experience the power of Christ’s resurrection had better be prepared to suffer with him. “Nothing gets resurrected until it dies,” proclaimed Berger.

The pit is God’s place for renewal—not just a renewal of worship experience (“In the pit, my hallelujah didn’t get stolen!”) but also for renewal of life ("Many will see it ... and trust in the Lord," says the Psalm. “New Song needs to be seen as well as sung,” says Berger).

Gerber’s deep spiritual realism has laid a solid foundation and provided focus for three-days of renewal and learning.



* * *

The National Worship Leader Conference is presented by Worship Leader magazine and hosted by the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas. The conference runs July 19-22.

Steve Berger and his wife have written about their experience of “the horrible pit” in Have Heart: Bridging the Gulf Between Heaven and Earth (Thomas Nelson, 2010).
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‘All Acolytes Are Pyromaniacs’

Fellow St. Barnabas parishioner (and Christian Century columnist) Rodney Clapp reports here on his life as an acolyte. He quotes his priest (and mine) as saying, “All acolytes are pyromaniacs.”

Despite the sound of its final syllable, the word acolyte has nothing to do with fire. It derives from a Greek word meaning path, modified to mean someone who follows—and thus referring to an assistant or helper. But as assistants in worship, acolytes do get to play with fire, and Rodney has exciting tales about smoking brooms sweeping up glowing coals.

Acolytes (who along with lectors and subdeacons later become minor orders) begin showing up in Christian records in the second century. But the practice of carrying two candles or torches in procession at the reading of the Gospel is not mentioned until the early 600s. Because St. Isidore of Seville says the candles were extinguished after the Gospel reading, Dom Gregory Dix thinks their use was at that point still utilitarian. But by the time the Ordo Romanus Primus was compiled about the year 800, the candles had taken on a clearly symbolic role. In the papal liturgy of the period, the candle bearers stood below the ambo steps, while the Gospel was read from above. The candles thus illumined nothing, but they symbolized everything: that the Gospel book stood for Christ.

Read Rodney Clapp's “My Life as an Acolyte.”
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IWS - where the amount of product in your hair doesn't matter

One of the great things about the late Bob Webber was his understanding that worship is not about us—it is about God.

I was reminded of this the other day when I got my review copy of Stuff Christians Like, by Christian satirist Jonathan Acuff. (Acuff’s book available here ; his website, here .)

Stuff Christians Like devotes several pages to the Metrosexual Worship Leader Scorecard. A worship leader with a soul patch gets three points, while one with a goatee gets only two. A scarf with a t-shirt gets a one point, while a winter knit hat in summer gets an additional two. And having huge gobs of product in your hair is absolutely essential to being a Metrosexual Worship Leader. (My score is somewhere in the negative numbers.)

Acuff’s satire sends up the way certain parts of the worship movement are consumed by style and appearance. And that made me appreciate the legacy of Bob Webber all the more. Worship, Bob kept reminding us, is about God. It “sings, preaches, and enacts God’s story,” not ours. Bob admonished us to turn away from forms “that assert the self as the source of worship.”

The day before the mail carrier delivered Stuff Christians Like, my e-mail brought me a press release about an important milestone for the Institute for Worship Studies, the graduate school Bob founded in 1999. For just over a decade, IWS has been training students in God-ward worship. In 2005 it began the accreditation process with the Association for Biblical Higher Education. Now, the school has been granted accredited status. IWS President Jim Hart calls it “a significant and critical threshold for the institute.”

A few days later I was walking across the campus of Wheaton College with Bob’s widow, Joanne. It’s the faculty, she said. The quality of the faculty is what impressed the accreditation team. In fact, faculty excellence was item two on a list of six commendations the team handed Jim Hart.

Other key items from that list of commendations: the school is operating debt free; it assembled library resources rapidly; it uses a blend of online and onsite instruction to create an innovative and substantive academic program; its capstone courses are noted for their rigor.

Having enrolled over 400 graduate students in its masters and doctoral programs over the past decade, IWS is playing a crucial role in focusing church leaders on worship that tells and enacts God’s story. This latest step—accreditation—is an important factor in the continuing stability of this mission.

Congratulations to everyone in the IWS family.

* * *

Photo: IWS President James R. Hart and Registrar Laura Ritter receive the plaque from Lisa Beatty, Chair of the Commission on Accreditation of the Association for Biblical Higher Education.
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Liturgy That Gives Rest

Today’s snail mail brought an envelope from Regent College theologian J. I. Packer. Inside was an article clipped from The Anglican Planet. It was titled “Liturgy That Gives Rest.” There was also a note in Packer’s hand commending its author, Julie Lane-Gay.

The article had many good things to say about the Anglican service: Its historicity gives it a “tried and trueness,” for example, and its use of the lectionary means that “old women in India, the Queen of England and surfers in Queensland—we are all on the same page.”

But the article’s main point was about its restfulness. That’s a point I resonate with.

Ms. Lane-Gay writes:

My first Anglican service was quiet and calm. Instead of feeling that I had to conjure up enthusiasm, I felt like someone had handed me an antique pillow to cradle my weary mind and soul. I didn’t have to think what to say.

My own experience was different. I wouldn’t have compared the liturgy to a pillow. But I felt the same relief that I didn’t have “to conjure up enthusiasm.” Conjuring up enthusiasm—and godly grief and glorious rapture and even stillness—all of that was part of what I had been exhorted to do in the religion of my youth, a religion that owed much to American revivalism.

That side of revivalism placed the accent in worship on my feelings. Revivalism fed off of a cycle of duress and release, and it required that I feel the right emotions as we approached the transactional moments of worship. When it came time to (re)dedicate myself to Jesus, the moment was validated or invalidated by my feelings.

The liturgy taught me that there was instead one great transaction. It happened on Calvary. In the liturgy, we celebrate and memorialize that transaction together—together as a local congregation and together with Christians around the globe, together with Christians throughout history and together with those who have gone on to glory. Fortunately, that celebration continues in spite of whatever feelings I may have because the great transaction was completed before I ever experienced my first emotion.

The liturgy “did the work of worship for me,” writes Lane-Gay. She discovered this when “after ten years of marriage, flexibility, and professional success, parenthood upended [their] lives.”

The liturgy took on a startling new role: it did the work of worship for me. I did not have to think up my prayers or create my own confession—neither of which I could have done in my sleep-deprived state. It took the pressure off me to evoke certain feelings. I rested in the liturgy; I sunk deep. … I could say the words just as they were printed, … and leave the rest to God. I did not have to cajole myself into being joyful or thankful or contrite. I could just show up at church, baby in tow, burp stains on my shoulder and participate.

Seven years and three more children later, she writes about being “able to arrive at church and fall into a structure far bigger than I.”

That bigness is what draws me to the liturgy. There’s a bigness in the church's liturgy just as there’s a wideness in God’s mercy.

The liturgy must be seen as part of God’s mercy. It is not the words that do “the work for me.” God acts toward me in the liturgy. That is why in Morning Prayer we often say a paraphrase of Psalm 51:15: “O Lord, open thou our lips, and our mouth shall show forth thy praise.” Without God’s help, we can’t even start praising.

When worship loses its bigness, the sense of God’s mercy also contracts. But when we join our voices with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we also know instinctively that the quality of God’s mercy is not strained.

* * *

Read Julie Lane-Gay’s full essay here.

Public domain image of 1596 Book of Common Prayer via Wikimedia Commons.
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The Healing Power of Church Choirs

Okay, I’ll admit that I inserted church in that title because I direct a church choir, and I am zealous for the preservation of church choirs. I’ll explain more about that below. But let’s begin by recognizing that choirs—church and otherwise—have healing properties.

In his book Beauty and the Soul, Piero Ferrucci illustrates the power of music to heal by telling a story about a group of French monks.

Shortly after the 1960s liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council, 70 out of 90 monks in a particular Benedictine monastery grew strangely ill. “They were lethargic, depressed, unable to carry out their normal tasks,” writes Ferrucci. Various medical experts came to study the monastery, but only one—a research audiologist named Tomatis—was able to identify their problem.

Only one thing had changed in their lives. Before the Vatican II reforms, the monks had chanted eight or nine times a day for 10 to 20 minutes at time. After the reforms, they hardly chanted at all. “Tomatis prescribed a return to the past order, and within weeks all the monks recovered,” Ferrucci reports.

* * *

What are we to make of this story? Scientifically, it is hard to say. But it provokes several key ideas.

First, monastic chant—although it is sung in unison--creates a kind of interpersonal harmony. Good unison singing attunes us not just to notes but also to the rhythms of a group. When we sing together, we breathe together. We become something organic. Ferrucci reminds us that singing in chorus is a social activity and that “there is no better example of social inclusion” than a chorus.

Second, chant is meditative. Meditation on a deeply spiritual text, such as the psalms, canticles, and ancient hymns, attunes us to truth. When we are out of tune with truth, we become dis-eased. We can only be healthy when we are in tune with the truth.

Third, singing is physical. Those who don’t do it much may not realize how important posture and breathing are to proper singing, but there is certainly a heathful property to practicing the proper postures and diaphragmatic breathing demanded by singing.

* * *
Ferrucci writes that since Tomatis’s experience with the monks, many studies have been done that demonstrate the link between healing and singing in chorus. He goes on to list the many healing uses to which music is now put in hospices, in psychiatric wards, in pain management programs, and in neonatal care units.

Remember the title of Ferrucci’s book: Beauty and the Soul. While we can quantify the aerobic benefits to body tissues that proper breathing brings, beauty eludes measurement. But surely beauty is as important as any other factor in music’s healing power.

* * *
Now let me explain why in the title of this post I modified choir with the word church: “The Healing Power of Church Choirs.”

As more and more of our churches allow praise bands to edge out church choirs, they are not merely replacing the old-fashioned with the contemporary. They are not merely exchanging one cultural style for another.

When worship bands edge out church choirs, they are also robbing one segment of the congregation of the healing power of choral singing. In addition, they are depriving the whole congregation of the unique support a choir provides for the singing of the gathered people of God. Many praise bands discourage congregational singing, whether because of the sheer volume of their playing or because of the solo performance style of the music they lead. A good amateur church choir, properly located in an acoustically vibrant worship space, can provide incredible encouragement to the less trained singers in the congregation.

Preserve our church choirs. They are important for the emotional, social, and spiritual health of our congregations.

* * *
Beauty and the Soul will be published by Tarcher/Penguin on August 20. Order it here.

Image: the children’s choir in which the author first learned to sing.
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A Mighty Cantata

Lutheran churches were celebrating Reformation Sunday this past weekend, and I was blessed to hear J. S. Bach’s eight-movement cantata based on Martin Luther’s hymn Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”) the way Bach intended—in the context of a worship service.

The Neffs met up with their friends Mark and Nina Moring at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois, for a splendid service of evening prayer complete with choir, orchestra, organ, and professional soloists.

In our time, Bach’s cantatas are usually performed as concert pieces, as if they were mini-oratorios, small-scale versions of Handel’s Messiah or Mendelssohn’s Elijah. But that is not at all what Bach had in mind. He wrote these pieces to be paired with sermons as musical expositions of Scripture.

Robin Leaver explained it all in issue 95 of Christian History and Biography: The Gospel According to J. S. Bach. In an article entitled “Sermons that Sing,” the Westminster Choir College musicologist described how this unique musical genre functioned in 18th-century Lutheran worship.

“These services were long,” writes Leaver, “lasting up to four hours—with a complex liturgical order based on Luther's evangelical reinterpretation of the traditional Mass.” (Fortunately, the service we attended on Reformation Sunday lasted just an hour and fifteen minutes.)

Leaver explains:

[T]he cantata was closely connected with both the reading of the Gospel and the sermon. The simple sequence was this:

Gospel, Nicene Creed, Cantata, Hymn, Sermon.

The portion from one of the Gospels appointed for that day was read. The choir responded to the Gospel, affirming the faith by singing the Nicene Creed in Latin. Then the choir and instrumentalists performed the cantata. The whole congregation responded by singing in German the hymn Wir glauben all' an einen Gott ("We all believe in one true God"), Luther's rhyming, metrical version of the Creed. After this second affirmation of faith came the sermon, a detailed exposition and application of the day's Gospel reading. The cantata therefore stood in the middle of a sequence that began with the Gospel reading and ended with the sermon. Like the sermon, the cantata was also an exposition and application of the Gospel of the day.

The cantata was thus a theological commentary on Scripture and even an exhortation to faith and perseverance. In the Ein’ feste Burg cantata we heard, God’s strength and sure victory are repeatedly invoked to urge the believer to be steadfast in fighting the devil.

The bass soloist sings:

Consider well, O child of God,
This love so mighty, which Jesus hath
In his own blood for thee now written;
By which he thee
For war opposing Satan’s host,
Opposing world and error,
Enlisted thee!
Yield not within thy spirit
To Satan and his viciousness!

The soprano (representing the Christian soul) then responds to God with this invitation:

Come in my heart’s abode,
Lord Jesus, my desiring!
Drive world and Satan out,
And let thine image find in me new glory!
Hence, prideful cloud of sin!

I’m sure the poetry is better in the original German, but you get the picture. This pattern of exhortation and faithful response repeats throughout the full range of Bach’s cantatas.

Leaver’s article gives examples from various Bach compositions of the many inventive ways he used both musical and literary techniques to drive home a gospel truth and evoke both the terror of God’s judgment and the comfort of his grace.

Bach’s—and Luther’s—message is ultimately about God’s triumph. As the libretto of Ein’ feste Burg tells us:

Who hath to Christ’s own bloodstained flag
In baptism sworn allegiance
Wins in spirit ever more.
All that which God has fathered
Is for victory intended.

* * *

Professor Leaver’s full article is available online, but only to ChristianHistory.net subscribers. You can sign up for a mere $12 a year (surely you can afford a paltry dollar a month).

Or you can order a print copy of Christian History & Biography issue 95 for $5.00 plus shipping and handling.

Listen to the first movement of J. S. Bach's Ein' feste Burg.

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The Church's Greatest Ornament

Here's a striking statement I heard today:

“Music is well or better able to praise God than the building of the church and all its decorations. It is the church’s greatest ornament.” —Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky

Source: Naxos Classical Music Spotlight podcast, “Rachmaninov Vespers, Academy of Choral Arts, Moscow,” September 8, 2008 (approx. 10 minutes into the audio file).You can subscribe to Naxos podcasts here or through the iTunes store. You can stream all podcasts at Naxos.com by registering to become a member. Read more!

The Three Little Pigs and the Life of Faith

Public radio raconteur Garrison Keillor grew up fundamentalist. So it was not surprising to hear him say in a recent News from Lake Wobegon segment (the quote is about 13 minutes in):

I used to think that faith was sort of like a building block, and you’d put all these blocks together, and you’d build a house sort of like the little pig built that the wolf could not blow down.

When I heard these words in Keillor’s comfortably weary voice, I thought of several friends who had grown up fundamentalist—including Bob Webber. Keillor’s metaphor (the brick house of the three little pigs) is defensive. It was a fortification, a bulwark against big bad wolves.

Webber also used defensive language when he described the theological system he picked up in his education and carried with him into his early years of teaching. Here are sentences and fragments from the opening chapter of Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail (1985).

… I was being swept away into evangelical rationalism…. Christianity was no longer a power to be experienced but a system to be defended. … My study of the Bible now turned into a defense of its inspired authorship.

… I was asked to teach a class called Christian Doctrine. Here’s my chance, I thought, to give them the goods, to show them how rationally defensible the Christian faith is and how reasonable it is to believe in the Christian system of things. …

I also thought I could rationally defend the Scripture as God’s mind written ….

I derived a great deal of security from my system. …

Keillor and Webber shared a defensive notion of faith as their starting point. The next step for Keillor was surrender.

I used to think that faith was sort of like a building block, and you’d put all these blocks together, and you’d build a house sort of like the little pig built that the wolf could not blow down. And now I get older, and I feel that faith is a matter of surrender. (Italics supplied)

Webber recalled his frustration in trying to prepare a chapel sermon for Wheaton College students, one that would deliver the answers Christianity had to offer to the questions of a world in despair. But Webber found the answers he knew so well to be “so cold, so calculated, to rational, so dead.” He crumpled up those pages of his sermon manuscript and threw them into the wastebasket.

I dropped back into my chair and sobbed for several hours. I had thrown away my answers. I had rid myself of a system in which God was comfortably contained. I had lost my security …

Both Keillor and Webber believed in a defensive faith that gave them a sense of security. Both Keillor and Webber abandoned a defensive posture and left the security of a system. But then their stories diverge.

Keillor again:

And now I get older, and I feel that faith is a matter of surrender. It’s a matter of just giving up and just leaving that house, of just walking out and experiencing the cold and the rain and doubt and confusion and trying to keep up your hope and some sense of gratitude. If you just keep up hope and gratitude, maybe that’s all you need.

Keillor replaces brick-wall security with stepping out into a cold, rainy, doubt-filled, confusing world, while (presumably by sheer will) “trying to keep up your hope and some sense of gratitude.”

That, of course, raises questions like these: Hope for what? Hope in what? Hope in whom? Gratitude for what? Gratitude to whom?

Webber also left the secure system. But his leaving was about seeking God. And that did not mean aimless wandering while willing yourself into hope and gratitude. Instead, Webber began a purposeful search and immersed himself in the study and experience of worship.

While the world may be cold and rainy and confusing, Webber discovered that abandoning the security of his defensive theology brought him into a greater community. His house, he discovered, wasn’t the only one. There are many mansions. There were people he hadn’t seen while living defensively. By leaving his secure box, not only did he experience God, he met others who experienced God: especially the venerable fathers and mothers of the early church and many contemporary believers whose traditions differed from his but which complemented his.

That is my experience as well. Leaving my little brick house did not mean being attacked by the big bad wolf. It meant discovering other houses, other people, other communities that (to shift the metaphor) presented a rich tapestry of faith.

But that tapestry, both Webber and I discovered, is not entirely woven of rationalist threads. Some of its fibers are images. Some are songs or poems. Some are inexplicable experiences. Some are miracles. Some are mysteries. Woven together they present us with a picture, an icon, of God. They do not contain God, but reveal him in glimpses. And that is something that brick walls can never do.

* * *
Be sure to register for the third annual Ancient Evangelical Future conference, October 9-11, featuring Dan Williams, Howard Snyder, Janell Paris, Rick Richardson, and David Fitch.

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Sermon: The "Ruulaship" of God Makes Settled Things Strange

I don't preach very often anymore. My role in leading worship is musical now--facilitating the congregation's worship in song by leading the choir and playing the pipe organ.

But today I preached, just to help out my pastor who was coming back from vacation and didn't want to spend his last week of vacation preparing a sermon.

I want to share that sermon with you because it illustrates a basic principle that Bob Webber wrote about in Ancient Future Worship: All of our worship should tell (and, if possible, perform) God's story as we know it from the biblical narrative. Bob's conception of what this means was expanded by a renewed engagement with the Hebrew Scriptures as he was writing this book.

Many sermons fail to range widely enough in the biblical story for the congregation to remember that they are living out part of a bigger narrative. A sermon should help believers see how their stories are expanded by God's story. A sermon should not squeeze God's story into the narrow confines of the believer's life narrative.

And so I offer this sermon as one humble effort to model that. Note the use of the Old Testament as well as the eschatological perspective. The prescribed Gospel reading for the day was the familiar list of what seem like miscellaneous kingdom parables from Matthew 13: The kingdom of heaven is like (a) a mustard seed, (b) yeast, (c) a man who finds buried treasure, (d) a merchant who finds a rare pearl, (e) a net full of fish, both good and bad.

I hope you find this helpful.

The Ruulaship of God Makes Settled Things Strange

A Sermon Preached July 27, 2008
at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Glen Ellyn, Illinois

G. K. Chesterton once said that "the function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange."

And that is true of Jesus' parables as well. The stories he told and the analogies he drew were not designed "to make strange things settled," but "to make settled things strange." That was why most people became puzzled or angry at his teaching. It didn't confirm their prejudices--which is what we expect religious or political leaders to do for us.

Now these parables, these comparisons or analogies--especially the ones we have heard these past three weeks from Matthew 13--are so familiar to us, we have heard them so often, that we may need a little help to see how they "make settled things strange."

So let's take a closer look. Each of these parables begins the same way: The kingdom of heaven is like ...

* The kingdom of heaven is like buried treasure.
* The kingdom of heaven is like yeast.
* The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who finds a very special pearl.
* The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.
* The kingdom of heaven is like a net full of fish--some kosher, some not kosher.
* The kingdom of heaven is like this: a man sows good seed in his field, but an enemy comes by night and sows noxious weeds. The man's servants want to pull up the weeds, but he counsels them to be patient and wait for the harvest.

It is important to understand that the central point of Jesus' preaching was about "the kingdom of heaven" or "the kingdom of God." The central point of Jesus' teaching was not Love (though he had a lot to say about love) or Inclusiveness (though a lot of welcome will flow from Christ-formed lives) or Social Justice (though Jesus' followers will be responsible for righting a lot of wrongs).

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus begins his public ministry by proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

That is in chapter 4. When we turn to chapter 5, we hear Jesus begin his most famous sermon with these words, "Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven belongs to them." The Sermon on the Mount is punctuated with references to the kingdom of heaven. And in chapter 6 he teaches his followers to pray, "Your kingdom come."

The phrase "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" is overly familiar to Christian ears. So let's use different words: instead of the word "kingdom," let's use the word "rule" or "reign" or "government." We do that, because "kingdom" can sound like we're talking about the territory a king rules over. But Jesus is talking about the act of "ruling." I like the way the West Indies Bible Society's planned Jamaican patois translation renders the Lord's Prayer, "Mek yu ruulaship kom." We can use that word for God's kingdom: Ruulaship.

Let's imagine ourselves living in Palestine a very long time ago, dealing with a series of foreign armies occupying our land and extracting taxes that keep us from eating the fruits of our labors. We are hungry and poor because of the Romans. And before them the Seleucids. And before them the Greeks. And before them the Persians. And before them the Babylonians. And before them the Assyrians. It seems like our entire history has been a history of oppression and occupation.

But our prophets have told of their visions that some day we wouldn't be ruled by foreign tyrants. We would someday be ruled by a king on the order of the great king David. And this king would bring the ruulaship of our God instead of tyranny. He would throw off their yoke of oppression. He would bring freedom, would this king, this anointed one, this Messiah. He would bring in "the reign of God."

This hope sustains us. It sustains us while our priests connive and collaborate with the Roman oppressors. They'll get what's coming to them, we know, when the Messiah comes.

* * *

Unfortunately, some people just can't bide their time. They think they can bring in the rule of God by fomenting a revolution. They believe that God wants them to draw a little blood just to get the revolution started. Once they put their lives on the line, they know God will finish the job. These firebrands are called Zealots. And among Jesus' followers, there are some Zealots.

Into this political tinder box, Jesus comes preaching that the rule of God is very near, that it is right now beginning in our midst. Good news. The time has come! Finally!

But then he starts talking weirdness. We are expecting a revolution, and he tells us that it's not going to be like that. I can just hear the disciples talking among themselves: "What's he been smokin'?"

The rule of God, he says, is like a mustard seed. A very tiny seed that eventually grows into a towering bush, but it does so quietly, unobtrusively. The rule of God, he says, is like yeast. You put it into a lump of dough, and the dough grows. But it works quietly, gently permeating the whole mass of dough. The rule of God, he says, is like a man who finds a treasure buried in a field. He keeps mum about it until he can buy the field and quietly take possession. Talk about it too soon, and the treasure will belong to someone else. The rule of God is like a merchant who finds the perfect pearl--but doesn't let on until he pulls all his assets together and makes the purchase.

All of these analogies emphasize the quiet, unobtrusive, gentle nature of the way the kingdom comes and grows.

God's rule does not come in obvious ways. The treasure is hidden. The perfect pearl is rare. The mustard seed is tiny. The yeast is almost invisible. You have to wait patiently for it to show itself.

You have to be observant, very perceptive to notice the first signs of God's rulership. And you have to be perceptive to even understand Jesus' teaching. Indeed, Jesus says, there is a gift of perception. Right here in this same chapter of Matthew, Jesus' disciples ask him why he is teaching in parables. And he says, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. ... [then, quoting Isaiah, Jesus says,] For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; ... But blessed are your eyes, [Jesus tells his students] for they see, and your ears, for they hear.'

You have to pay close attention. That same message is found in last week's lesson about the man whose wheat field was sabotaged by an enemy who planted weed seeds. The weeds were of a sort that looks just like wheat when it is young. Only after weeds and wheat have grown can you be sure you can tell them apart. So the owner of the field counseled patience. Lesson? Even when we're paying attention, we can't tell who around us is wheat and who is weed. The seemingly fine upstanding citizen may prove to be a rather nasty piece of work in the end. And the ne'er-do-well may turn out to be a rare perfect pearl. So be patient and pay attention, because as God's rulership arrives, things are not always as they seem.

This is really hard for us to hear in 2008 in the United States of America. We are a polarized nation. We feed on vicious rhetoric about our political leaders. Cable news shows mercilessly mock the candidates and perpetuate rumors. We repeat stories, spreading them across cyberspace, because they say what we want to hear rather than what we necessarily know to be true.

This is also hard for us to hear because we inhabit a culture of bigness. We are used to our country being the first, the fastest, the richest, the most resourceful, and the most bountiful. But then we get trapped in a credit crunch or a fossil-fuel crunch, and we are at a complete loss. We don't now how to do with less. We don't know how to see the beauty in the small. We are blind to the small ways God wants to work, his almost invisible, yeast-like manner that he uses to bring in his justice and his rule. The rule of God doesn't arrive in a gas-guzzling Hummer. It may just arrive on a donkey.

Let me quote from my friend Andy Crouch whose book Culture-Making has just been published. In a forthcoming interview in Christianity Today, Andy compares a Tower of Babel model for cultural transformation with an approach based on the Incarnation:

When God chose to intervene in the world, he thought it best to start in a pre-technological, modestly literate backwater town of the Roman Empire. And it’s the best because the revolution God was introducing to the world was designed precisely to undermine Babel’s idea that humans will scale up and, through homogeneity and technology, take over. The Babel story is not about love. Love is always small. So a cultural transformation that is going to eventually reseed the whole world with the fruits of love is going to have to start in a particular place and time with ordinary people.

* * *

But just when we're ready to think that God's work is always done in quiet, gentle ways, over long periods of patient waiting, Jesus takes us once again by surprise. When all is said and done, he says, there'll be hell to pay. In last week's lesson, Jesus tells how the owner of the field counseled patience until harvest time, but then he said that there will be a day when God's angels gather the wheat-people into God's barns, but they will throw the weed-people "into the blazing furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth."

And when Jesus tells the story of the big net full of fish, he says, "This is how it will be at the end of time. The angels will go out, and they will separate the wicked from the good, and throw them into the blazing furnace where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth."

When Father Matt asked me to preach this week, and I teased him: "You just don't want to have to preach about hell," I told him.

Behind my teasing is this fact: Contemporary Americans don't want to hear about judgment and final punishment. We value a gospel of tolerance, and we want God to be just like us. A recent Pew study showed that fewer and fewer people believe in ultimate punishment. Especially when compared to the persistence of belief in heaven. In a general population sample, 74% (nearly three quarters) said they believe in a heavenly reward. While a significantly lower 59% believe that there is a hell. But we don't need to listen to polls. We need to listen carefully to what Jesus says.

God isn't tolerant, Jesus tells us. And he shouldn't be blandly tolerant. We are the ones who have become hardened to the pain and suffering of others--as long as the suffering isn't in our back yard. But God cares passionately about the things that hurt the creation he loves. He is not indifferent to evil. Judgment is not the bad news that puts the good news into sharper focus. It is not merely the logical "other side of the coin." Judgment is itself part of the Good News. God passionately loves his creatures and he will "deliver us from evil."

And so there will be justice, Jesus says. But it is God's justice in God's time and in God's way. Please note that these images do not speak about eternal, conscious torment. Jesus' paints a picture of destruction and disposal, as when the harvesters take the wheat to the threshing floor, and separate the grain from the chaff. They store up the grain and throw the chaff into the fire. That's a picture of disposal, not punishment. Likewise, with Jesus' saying about the dragnet that pulls in a whole host of fish, some of them kosher and edible, others not. He draws a picture of separation and disposal. There will be wailing and grinding of teeth, but that is the weed-people's response to exclusion from God's bright future. Our God does not torture.

Now in the story of the weeds and the wheat, Jesus names two groups who will be thrown into the furnace. First: the people who cause others to stumble. That is, those who draw others into destructive behaviors that ruin relationships and families and health and economic well-being. You could come up with various examples, but a few years ago I heard one that to me seemed an apt illustration. I met a banker in Dubuque who told me how right after the riverboat casinos came to that fair city, the default rate on mortgages simply skyrocketed. Behind that default rate, you can easily imagine, are a lot of ruined families and broke breadwinners suffering from a gambling addiction. Do you want God to turn a blind eye to those who prey on the weakness of others and entice them into trouble?

The second category Jesus mentions are the people who promote a lifestyle of lawlessness. Jesus is not talking about those who, like all of us, stumble from time to time and do things we know we shouldn't. Jesus is describing those who thumb their noses at God's way of life. The word "law" has taken on some very negative connotations in Christian parlance, but Jesus is teaching in a Jewish setting, where the word "law" actually stands for something very positive: God's wisdom about right living that fosters human flourishing. Do we really think God should bless those who obstinately refuse his wisdom for living?

These people, Jesus says, will get what's coming to them, but you, he says, you, my followers, will shine like the sun in your heavenly Father's realm. The time for comeuppance is not now, and you are not the agents of justice. That is for the angels of God at the end of the age--after the mustard seed has grown into a bush and after the yeast has permeated the lump of dough.

And so as Jesus uses these parables "to make settled things strange," he gives us three unsettling gifts:

* First, he gives us eyes to see the unexpected, to see the hidden and surprising ways God works.
* Then he gives us patience, for having seen God at work, we know we can trust him to finish what he starts without our untimely interference. As Paul writes in Philippians 1:6, "The one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ."
* And then third, he gives us hope of justice. The meek will indeed inherit the earth, and not just the dirt. Those who are persecuted for righteousness sake--that is, because they stood up for justice--will inherit the kingdom of heaven. The poor and those who mourn--they too can have a confident hope of justice.

The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.

* * *

Information on Andy Crouch's Culture-Making is available here and here and here.





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Review: The Urgency of "Ancient-Future Worship"

Almost 20 years ago, I met the late dean of historical theologians, Jaroslav Pelikan, at a conference at Carthage College.

“Do you know what you evangelicals need?” Pelikan asked me.

“What?” I said, taken aback by his forthrightness.

“You need to stop being so Jesus-centered.”

I was too stunned to say much.

Seeing my confusion, Pelikan explained: “You evangelicals need to be more thoroughly Trinitarian.”

That was the extent of our conversation, but I’ve been thinking about it since that 1991 encounter.

If I read Bob Webber’s posthumously published Ancient-Future Worship (Baker, 2008) correctly, I believe Bob would agree with Pelikan.

Pelikan did not, of course, mean that evangelicals should actually talk about Jesus less, love him less dearly, or follow him less nearly. Pelikan meant rather that we should regard him in his proper context as the second person of the Holy Trinity. If we forget to understand Jesus in his Trinitarian context, we forget the cosmic purpose of Jesus’ incarnation and we collapse God's grand mission in Jesus into one or another form of religious individualism. Jesus came to save me from my sins, yes. But the mission of the Trinity is to restore and renew the entire creation to fellowship with the divine community of love.

In his latest volume on worship, Webber moves into this Trinitarian territory.

The book is subtitled Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative. God’s narrative begins before the creation and stretches infinitely into the future of a restored creation. In worship, my own narrative—my story about the genesis of my troubles and my renewal of hope for a life freed from failure—should never become the narrow frame into which we squeeze God’s story. Rather, our stories are to be caught up into God’s story and find expanded meaning there.
Evangelicals—indeed most Western Christians—think about the biblical story like this: Creation, Sin and Fall, Cross and Redemption.

But in some of the church fathers, there is a different framework: Creation, Incarnation, and Eschatological Re-Creation. Webber turns especially to the second-century bishop Irenaeus and his theology of recapitulation to underscore this way of framing God’s story. (If you need a quick refresher on the theology of recapitulation, see my October 2007 blog post “What’s the Fuss about Recapitulation Theology?”)

If the middle term of our three-part story is Sin and Fall, the focus is on us, the problem-makers. But if the middle term is the Incarnation, the focus is on God, the problem-solver. In chapter 4, Bob's hip-pocket history of “How the Fullness of God’s Story Got Lost,” he writes about the neglect of the Word in medieval Western worship.

By the late medieval period the service of the Word with preaching was infrequent. The Mass was generally reduced to the eucharistic prayers. Because the Word was dropped and the focus [of] the Mass centered on the death of Christ, the whole story of God was not proclaimed in worship. The story was reduced to the death of Christ, his suffering, and the salvation that was brought through the sacraments.

The Reformers tried different correctives to this hypersacrament- alism. But the Reformation liturgies retained one thing that distinguished them from the ancient church: “Worship now places greater attention on the individual’s condition before God. The vision of God to reclaim the whole world and redeem all flesh and matter through the victory of Christ over sin and death scarcely appears.”

Webber's purpose is to get us to reclaiming this larger vision. He does this by

* showing us from early church texts that the renewal of all things in the Incarnation and the restoration of all things through Christ’s victory was the common theme of early church worship.

* asking us to be Old Testament Christians as well as New Testament believers. This requires that we know the Hebrew Scriptures as background to the New Testament, but it also demands that we imitate the apostles by reading the Hebrew Scriptures as foreshadowings of what would happen in the Incarnation.

* calling us to stick to the basics of worship—Word and Table. We must especially resist the idea that music is a fundamental element of worship, as many contemporary evangelicals have come to believe. Music can play an important role in worship, but unlike Word and Table, it is not of the essence. When people seek the presence of God in music, writes Webber, rather than in the Word or the Table, the accent shifts to the activity of the self in worship ("I will praise you," "I lift your Name on high," etc.).

* inviting us to return to the ancient patterns of prayer that frame our petitions in the light of what God has done. Because this kind of prayer arises out of God's story, it does not grow out of our own needs of the moment or those of our friends. Thus we remember to pray "for the whole state of Christ's church and for the world." If God has demonstrated his love for the whole world, we can do no less than to pray big prayers for the whole world.

Ancient-Future Worship is a grand summing up of Bob's increasingly urgent word to the church. His message is not optional. The breadth of the church's vision and the scope of its mission depend on understanding the mission of the Trinity as it seeks to restore and recreate not just us but the entire cosmos.

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New Free Church Statement: 'Ordinances Nourish the Believer'

The Evangelical Free Church in America has a new statement of faith. On June 26, delegates to its National Leadership Conference affirmed the revised statement by a wide margin. Because of their relationship to the EFCA, Trinity International University (including Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) and Trinity Western University will adopt this revision as well. (Read the EFCA’s 2008 statement here, and compare the text of the denomination’s earlier statement from 1950 here.)

My colleague Collin Hansen will be writing on the Christianity Today website about the significance of the revised statement. (Collin is an interested party, since he currently attends Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.) But on this blog, I want to focus on one particular aspect that Ancient-Future Christians will find especially interesting.

The subject is “ordinances” (or as some of us call them, “sacraments”). The EFCA’s prior statement treats their observance as a matter of duty and warns against thinking they might be means of salvation. Here’s the text from 1950:

Water baptism and the Lord's Supper are ordinances to be observed by the Church during the present age. They are, however, not to be regarded as means of salvation.

The new statement is of an entirely different tone. First, it embeds the ordinances in an article on the church, rather than splitting them from the life of the community and treating them in the abstract. This is important because the ordinances are actions of the gathered community. Baptism is into the body of Christ. The Lord’s Supper is a community meal. Solitary baptism and solitary communion would be meaningless.

Second, the new statement says baptism and the Lord’s Supper “visibly and tangibly express the gospel.” This is significant, because some parts of the EFCA have (like much of evangelicalism) been highly logocentric. But as many, including Bob Webber, have pointed out, we are in an age when worship needs to recover its ancient connection to the material creation. This is not to downplay the importance of the Word. It is to recognize that human beings are multidimensional, and that God ordains (the verb from which we get “ordinance”) that his material creation should participate in his salvation.

Here is a brief passage from Bob Webber’s Ancient-Future Worship (Baker, 2008). After reflecting on Irenaeus’s insight that Christ’s Incarnation shows God’s intent to save the whole creation, Bob writes:

God has descended in the incarnation and taken union with humanity so that humanity may ascend into union with him. This profound theme of the incarnation has rich implications for an earthed worship. By “earthed worship” I mean to emphasize how ancient worship is not an escape from this world. Worship uses the substance of nature—water, oil, bread, wine, movement, symbol—to proclaim that all of creation has been redeemed.

Third, the ECFA’s new statement says that the ordinances “confirm and nourish the believer.” Whereas the 1950 statement used the language of command (“ordinance”) and warning (“not to be regarded as means of salvation”), the 2008 statement echoes the ancient notions of the Eucharist as medicine and food. The ordinances are positive gifts of God to be celebrated, and not merely duties to be observed with caution.

In an e-mail, Greg Strand, the EFCA’s director of biblical theology and credentialing, told me: “Our commitment to the ordinances is stated more strongly, and we acknowledge, in a positive, affirming way, they are to be celebrated by believers.”

Here’s the full text of the new statement’s article on the church:

We believe that the true church comprises all who have been justified by God's grace through faith alone in Christ alone. They are united by the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ, of which He is the Head. The true church is manifest in local churches, whose membership should be composed only of believers. The Lord Jesus mandated two ordinances, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which visibly and tangibly express the gospel. Though they are not the means of salvation, when celebrated by the church in genuine faith, these ordinances confirm and nourish the believer.

Many of the older statements of faith adopted by evangelical denominations and institutions had a astringent flavor, as they appeared primarily to be drawing boundaries so that they could tell who was in and who was out. This new EFCA statement seems to celebrate God’s goodness and grace. This seems to reflect the confidence of a community that, while still guarding truth against error, no longer sees itself as embattled but as blessed.
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Chant Hits the Charts--Again

The New York Times reports to- day that a chant re- cording by the monks of Heiligen- kreuz monastery in Austria has soared on the British pop charts (at one point beating out Madonna).

The album, entitled "Chant: Music for the Soul," will be released in the United States next Tuesday.

The last time we saw such a phenomenon was the stunning success of the 1994 chant album by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain.

Obviously, Gregorian chant is not for everyone. It is an archaic musical idiom. But these periodic crossover albums demonstrate that chant does appeal to many more people than we usually imagine. Within a limited repertoire, we can in 2008 still use chant in public worship.

There are simple chant melodies in many hymnals, and many of us already know some of them. One of the first that I learned (my father taught it to me as a child) is a tune known as Divinum Mysterium, with the English text "Of the Father's Love Begotten." It is a lovely Christmas chant, and congregations can easily learn to sing it.

* * *

What is the appeal of Gregorian chant?

First, it can be musically very simple, moving stepwise up and down the scale with only a few leaps. If you know "Of the Father's Love Begotten," you will see immediately what I mean. The chantlike French folk tune that is paired with the words "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" is chantlike for that very reason.

Second, in its less elaborate forms, chant serves the text. The music is not something you want to whistle and tap your foot to. The music gives the text a boost without overshadowing it.

Third, chant is placid. If I have had a hectic week, why should I go to a worship service where percussion-punctuated praise music thumps my nerves and bumps up my blood pressure? Chant can help me slow down enough to pay attention to God's still small voice.

* * *

A few weeks ago, I visited the non-denominational Community of Jesus on Cape Cod, where singing Gregorian chant as part of the regular worship services is part of the routine. The musicians in that community have been given the charge by European guardians of the chant tradition to foster it here in America.

One of those musicians, organist James Jordan, told me of his plan to develop a simple method of teaching local churches how to begin using chant. (I think he's still working on that.)

In the meantime, you can hear their community's own choir (the Gloria Dei Cantores Schola) singing chant on any of the seven chant CDs they have recorded. In addition, you can hear the gold-standard chant recordings by the monks of the Abbey of Solesmes in France. Click this link from the Community of Jesus' publishing arm, Paraclete Press, for a list of available disks. And if you're a Gregorian junkie, you can get a 26-disk set by the two choirs for 30% off. Books on chant are also available.
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The End of the Story: How the Dismissal Can Shape Our Worship

In the 16th century, humanistic scholarship opened up the Scriptures anew and upstart scholars challenged the Church’s traditions by their fresh reading of the Bible. Part of their debate was over the meaning of the Mass, and particularly what happened in the re-presentation of Jesus’ sacrifice in the consecrated bread and wine. That disagreement not only split the nascent Protestant movement from Rome, but it divided the reform movements from each other.

Medieval Catholic teaching set the agenda for the discussion, and the Reformers responded out of necessity on that point. But what if liturgical Christians looked at the the Eucharist) through a different lens? My friend Greg Pierce has recently published a book that does just that with the liturgy (The Mass Is Never Ended: Rediscovering Our Mission to Transform the World, Ave Maria Press, 2007).
If you want to understand a familiar story, consider how it ends. Then look back and see how various plot elements point forward in clear or obscure ways to how things will turn out. The “end of the story” for liturgical Christians is the dismissal, when the deacon or priest says, “Go, the Mass is ended,” or in more contemporary rites, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” The congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.”

What can we mine from that brief exchange about the purpose of Christian worship? The word mass did not always refer to the entire order of worship. The original Latin phrase (Ite, missa est) literally means, “Go. It is the sending-forth.” That in turn raises the question of what we are being sent forth for.

The term missa simply means sending. But to Christian ears steeped in the language of the New Testament, there are clear echoes of passages such as “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21) and “As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). We are part of God’s mission to the world. And when at the end of a liturgical worship service we are sent forth, it is precisely as part of God’s mission to the world and as representatives of Christ.

For Greg Pierce, this sending into the world is a sending into the world of work. (Greg has made spirituality in the workplace the focus of his efforts at ACTA publishing.) Work is what most of us do—whether paid work or the unpaid variety that improves and eases the lives of families, friends, fellow citizens, and strangers. So the various parts of the worship service must strengthen us and prepare us to do that work in Christ’s way. The sermon, which is supposed to help us hear God’s scriptural voice speak more clearly, had better not stop short of application to daily life. Saying the Creed together should be understood as assuring that we are all on the same page before we take up our mission for another week. The prayers should, of course, praise God, but they must also address our world of work. Communion is receiving strength for the task, because Jesus himself is the food and drink that sustain us on our kingdom-advancing mission.

Has Greg gone out on a limb by trying to view Christian worship through the lens of the dismissal? It doesn’t sound very Catholic (at least to Protestant ears).

Not really. On the back cover of his book, Greg has reprinted Pope Benedict XVI’s comments on the dismissal: “These words help us to grasp the relationship between the Mass just celebrated and the mission of Christians in the world. ... The People of God might be helped to understand more clearly this essential dimension of the Church’s life, taking the dismissal as the starting-point” (The Sacrament of Charity, 51).

The Mass Is Never Ended is a quick read with short chapters that leave you wanting more. It is therefore a good stimulus to help us think about whether the way we conduct and participate in worship really does help us in our task of advancing God’s kingdom in our daily lives. The book is written in a simple style to encourage Catholic lay people to think about their public worship as preparation for their daily work and to think of their daily work as an extension of their public worship. But non-Catholics and non-lay people need to be encouraged to think along these same missional lines.

Now, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

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What Makes a Good Hymn Last?

Today at the office, a colleague put the March-April 2008 issue of Worship Leader in my hands--and lo and behold, there I was.

I'd completely forgotten that they'd interviewed me about what makes a good hymn last and about the relative strengths and weaknesses of traditional hymns compared to contemporary worship music.

You can read the article here. I hope you'll notice the way my remarks feed into Bob Webber's notion of "blended worship." Read more!

Institute for Worship Studies passes accreditation hurdle

The late theologian Bob Webber had a vision for an academic program where people could pursue graduate-level studies in worship, without having to pass through the standard seminary channels first. There are a lot of church musicians and worship leaders whose training is in music or dance or some other related field--people with the academic abilities but who for career reasons cannot take the M.Div. detour before studying the theology and history of worship.

In 1998, Bob founded the Institute for Worship Studies in Jacksonville, Florida. It has been a nontraditional program that combines on-site seminars with distance learning. It's facilities are seriously limited, but it has attracted a knowledge-hungry and enthusiastic group of students, having graduated 161 students from over 30 denominations in its 10 years of existence.

Last week I got an e-mail from IWS president Jim Hart, excitedly telling me that the school had passed a major hurdle in the accreditation process.It has been granted candidate status with the Association for Biblical Higher Education. According to the IWS press release:

Candidate Status grants the Institute membership in the association, and also provides pre-accredited status. Pre-accredited status is granted by the ABHE to institutions that meet its Conditions of Eligibility, and provide a basis for achieving accreditation status within four years.

Congratulations to Jim Hart and the IWS community!The press release with full information is posted at the website of the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. Read more!

Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: Holy Week Edition

Today's mail brought the brochure for this year's performance of Franz Joseph Haydn's The Seven Last Words at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel (string quartet version with guest meditations). I mention it because I'm one of the "special guests" providing one of the meditations. Others include Martin Marty, David Tracy, John Buchanan, Willie T. Barrow, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. For the full list and for ticket information, click here and scroll down to March 18.

This will be the second time I've participated in this event, which is made especially meaningful by violist Richard Young's pre-concert parsing of Haydn's musical themes and their relation to the theological themes of the work. (Young collected meditations from past years in Echoes from Calvary. His essay on the relationship of the music to the theology can be found in the book's appendix.)

In 2004, shortly before I first spoke at one of these events, I wrote up the following historical commentary for Christianity Today:

The Passion, Eight Adagios, and an Earthquake

Haydn's Seven Last Words is a powerful guide for Good Friday meditation.

By David Neff | posted 3/01/2004 12:00AM

In writing about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I identified it as a devotional exercise. It seemed to me to be an extended visual meditation on the five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Others have identified it as a meditation on the Stations of the Cross. In any case, the movie translated a classic Christian devotion into a shockingly modern form.

The church has preached the Cross from its apostolic beginnings at Pentecost, but it seems that once people heeded the message of the Cross and became followers of Jesus, they felt a need to structure personal and communal ways to remember that pivotal event in salvation history.

The most ancient description of a ritualized remembering of the Passion is a fourth-century eyewitness report by a Spanish nun named Egeria. She traveled to the Holy Land and reported that Christians in Jerusalem gathered for three hours on Good Friday to listen to the bishop read from the Scriptures the prophecies of the Lord's Passion and their fulfillment.

Christians have developed other forms of commemoration (literally, "remembering together"), such as walking the Way of Sorrows (via dolorosa) either literally in Jerusalem or symbolically by praying and meditating before a series of plaques that recount the events of Jesus' painful trek to Calvary.

This Holy Week, I am going to participate in another variation on such communal remembering: a service of meditations on the Seven Last Words. This service was first developed by Jesuit missionaries in Peru, who blended cross-centered preaching with guided meditation to create a kind of congregational "spiritual exercise." In Jesuit terms, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says, Spiritual Exercises refers to a 4-week program of meditations designed by Ignatius Loyola to combine "sense impressions, imagination, and understanding, in actuating the will towards the pursuit of perfection." Ignatius devoted fully one-quarter of the meditations (the third week) to the Passion, and these meditations shaped the spiritual lives of his followers. In the century after Loyola created the Spiritual Exercises, these Jesuit missionaries created a three-hour meditation on Jesus' seven sayings from the Cross for use on Good Friday.

This service eventually became an occasion for dramatic music as well as meditation. In 1785 or '86, the Austrian Catholic composer Franz Joseph Haydn received a request from Spain to write a series of seven orchestral interludes to accompany the spoken parts of the service. Though Haydn wrote with classical restraint just after the close of the Baroque era, the spirit of the Spanish Baroque is at work in this project. (To gain a visual impression of how the Spanish imagination had dealt with the Passion, consider the Pieta by El Greco, Ignatius's younger contemporary, or Christ on the Cross by Velasquez, who lived at the same time the Jesuits shaped their meditations on the Seven Last Words.)

Here is how Haydn himself described the service for which he composed his Seven Last Words:

Some fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on the seven last words of Our Savior on the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce an oratorio every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the center of the roof broke the solemn darkness.

At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar. The interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the conclusion of each discourse.

My composition was subject to these conditions, and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners.

Haydn's music—an introduction, seven musical meditations on the words, and a final "earthquake" movement—not only succeeded in not "fatiguing the listeners," but its popularity and power has lasted more than 200 years, from its first performance in 1787 till now. Haydn also created a version for string quartet so that the music could be played where the full forces of an orchestra were not available. And in 1795-96, he wrote a choral version, which was published in 1801.

In one of history's curious twists, Good Friday services that focus on the Seven Last Words have become more popular among Protestants than among Catholics. Perhaps this is because the service lends itself to preaching, and Protestants, we all know, love to preach. The service also lends itself to multiple preachers, which is why it is often sponsored as an ecumenical service by local ministerial fellowships.

The event in which I will be participating this year, uses Haydn's string quartet version, and its nature is ambiguous. Is this a concert? Or is this a service? The promotional materials call it a "concert," a "performance," and a "presentation," but in order to be true to the work's original intent, eight religious leaders (including yours truly) will be offering brief meditations. (I am speaking on "I Thirst." In two previous events, CT's associate news editor Stan Guthrie spoke on the same saying from the cross.)

The ambiguity is heightened by the choice of venue: the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. A grand Gothic-revival structure, the broad strokes of the Rockefeller Chapel's architecture evoke medieval cathedrals with their soaring tribute to God's transcendence. But whereas Gothic cathedrals were filled with Christian symbolism: crosses, angels, saints, pelicans, and such, the details of Rockefeller Chapel reflect the liberal Protestant spirit of its times, and its few Christian symbols are discreetly placed so as not to offend anyone.

The musicians for this occasion are the Vermeer Quartet, and I know from conversations with violist Richard Young that they take very seriously the religious character of Haydn's music and its performance. Since 1988, their annual presentations have tried to recreate something of the original experience.

Not everyone can get to the Vermeer Quartet's concerts at the University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University where they blend music and spoken meditation. So in 1994 they produced a two-CD set—one CD that is music only, and one CD that features both music and spoken word. The CD features such high-profile preachers as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr., renowned scholars such as Raymond Brown and Martin Marty, and the voice of Jason Robards.

Whether you participate in person or by listening to a recording, the music of Haydn is a powerful instrument to help focus meditation on the Lord's Passion.

Sidebar:

The Seven Last Words

Jesus' sayings from the Cross

• Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:24)
  
  
• Today thou shalt be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43)
  
  
• Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother. (John 19:26-27)
  
  
• My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:45-46)
  
  
• I thirst. (John 19:28-29)
  
  
• It is finished. (John 19:30)
  
  
• Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. (Luke 23:46)
  
  

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Some of Us Still Sing Hymns

I keep hearing that hymn-singing in churches is virtually extinct, that contemporary praise-and-worship music (accompanied by contemporary praise-and-worship bands) has completely taken over the church music scene.

That's why I was thankful for small graces today when I saw the results of a (totally unscientific) poll on the Christianity Today website. We asked our readers what they sing in church.

Here are the percentages:

Almost exactly half do sing predominantly "modern worship choruses." But 34% sing "mostly hymns." We who love (or at least tolerate) meaning-packed rhyming text set to predictably rhythmic tunes are not quite yet extinct!

Christianity Today Poll
What do you sing in church?

Mostly hymns - 34%

Mostly modern worship choruses - 52%

Mostly gospel/spirituals - 2%

Other - 12%

Total Votes - 849


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Dr. Luther, Rapmeister

Last week the e-newsletter from ChurchLaughs.com brought me a chuckle.

The lead cartoon featured a pastor talking to his worship leader. “Okay,” says the pastor to the guitar-clutching musician. “We’ll do the rock service, but forget about rapping the Nicene Creed.” (Oh, the challenges of "blended worship"!)

As soon as I had chuckled at the cartoon, I realized there was a historical precedent. Others had already had set the creed to rhyming, rhythmic verse, hoping to make it memorable for worshipers. Tobias Clausnitzer (1668) and Cyril V. Taylor (1941) are among the lesser known writers to attempt this. The most famous was clearly Martin Luther (“We All Believe in One True God,” 1524).

* * *

Now Martin Luther didn’t write rap. Rap is not just rhyme and meter. Rap is also improvisation (and therefore a vehicle for personal statement and an opportunity to show off just a bit).Yet Luther, like rappers, placed a premium on the words over the music. Among his many hymns were didactic songs that helped the people learn their faith.

Luther’s Shorter Catechism is well known as a brief and digestible guide to the faith. It was organized around what he considered the basics: The Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, Confession, and the Sacrament of the Altar. If one understood these things, one could be an informed believer. One would be equipped to understand the gospel and to resist superstition.

It isn’t surprising then that Luther would also write a hymn to convey each of these truths. The American Edition of Luther’s Works comments on his Ten Commandments hymn (“These Are the Holy Ten Commands”):

We have become so accustomed to think of poetry as an expression of the personal feelings and emotions of the writer that we cannot conceive of a merely “utilitarian” use of poetry. Hymnody in our own age has been defined as “lyrical religion.” We find it difficult to think of a merely didactic hymn without sentimental overtones.

But Luther proceeded from different premises. Very soberly he thought of the hymn as a means of instilling the Word of God in the people. While some of his hymns were born out of his most personal experience and reflected the struggles and victories of his own faith, others were mere versifications of the Catechism.

His setting of the Creed seems a little less didactic than the Ten Commandments hymn, because it is the bold declaration of a common faith.

We all believe in one true God,
Maker of the earth and heaven,
The Father who to us the power
To become his sons hath given.

But the didactic purpose is still blended with the joyous celebration of truth.

Luther relied on an earlier medieval attempt to versify the Creed, but that poem tried to cover the creed in a single stanza. Luther expanded the structure to three stanzas to reflect the three parts of the Creed, one for each person of the Trinity. That larger structure required more material, and so he infused the hymn with additional truth (as in the brief excerpt above, where he inserted the idea from John 1:12 that we have been given the power to become children of God).

Luther wasn’t just interested in teaching the faith; he was interested in teaching the young. He was worried about the things that seduce young people away from the faith. And so he explained in a preface to a 1524 hymnal:

These songs were arranged in four parts to give the young—who should at any rate be trained in music and other fine arts—something to wean them away from love ballads and carnal songs and teach them something of value in their place.

That makes him sound like one of the architects of Youth for Christ in the 1950s!

Hats off to the Reformer dude, Rapmeister Martin.

* * *

P.S. So what do I think about rapping the Creed? Well, the main thing I have against it is that rap isn’t a communal form of expression, while the Creed is the statement of a community of belief. But if we all had a good enough sense of rhythm, we might be able to rap it together.

* * *

Concordia Publishing has published a 4-CD set of Luther's Hymns, Ballads, and Chants. You can here a short bit of "We All Believe in One True God" here and another excerpt of "These Are the Holy Ten Commands" here.


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