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Why the Church Keeps Singing
Psalm 96
There is no way to underestimate the power of music in the life of faith.
From the very beginnings, ours has been a singing faith. That is true in the joyful
moments of our life together, but it’s especially true when the worst happens, and
we discover in our congregational singing that our faith is being carried by the
notes. At times we sing the music of our belief for each other.
The words of that early American hymn describe it well—“My life flows on
in endless song above earth’s lamentation. I hear the real though far-off hymn that
hails a new creation. No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m
clinging. Since love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”
I’m sure you’ve noticed that’s been the church’s posture throughout its life.
We are always singing. From the highest moments of celebration, to the lowest
moments of tragedy, the church has sung its faith through music. In very real
ways, we are singing our lives, turning our lives into walking doxologies—walking
songs of praise to the God who loves us beyond measure.
And one thing the church insists is that we do not sing alone. As someone
once wrote, “We are each bearers of the music that has accumulated in our
experience of time. Voices and sounds from our past inhabit us.”
A week ago today one of the voices from my past died. Her name was
Barbara and she was as big a character as you could ever meet. She was known for
everything from complaining that her sister’s couch wasn’t comfortable when she
was actually sitting on her sister’s cat to wearing tennis shoes even with her most
formal attire. Barbara sang in the choir at the church where I served in Nashville,
and she sat beside me in the tenor section for several years. I can still hear her
voice sounding in my ear to this day.
As I thought about how Barbara’s voice inhabits me, I remembered
something that I had forgotten. During choir rehearsal, I would try to get Barbara
to come in at the wrong time. I would lean in close, take a big breath, look as if I
was about to sing, and then I would wait for her to jump in at the wrong time. If
you had known Barbara, you would know why people got such a kick out of this.
Each time, she would glare at me as if to say, “Don’t you ever do that again.”
At a deep level, that’s what I think these musicians who move among us
each week are doing for us. They are leaning in close and drawing a breath and
attempting to get us to join in the song. When they lead us in congregational song,
or when they offer a piece of music to God on our behalf, they are not simply
doing the job for us. And they are certainly not performing for us, which is one of
the reasons I seldom respond with applause. They are making an offering, and
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their gifts most often call for me to join the song as well, even if I don’t utter a
word or ring a bell or play an instrument.
On this day when we celebrate the music which we offer to God from this
sanctuary—and with our lives—there is perhaps a deeper question that needs to be
asked: why does the church bother to make music in the first place? Why do the
scriptures keep inviting us “to sing the Lord a new song?”
That question is particularly live in times like these. How can the church
sing when bombs are exploding and people are dying? How can the church sing
when plants are closing and people are being laid off? How can the church sing
when there is so much suffering in the world and in our own lives? Doesn’t it
seem a bit callous for the church to sing when all around us people have stopped
singing?
In a wonderful book on congregational singing, John Bell reflects on eleven
reasons why the church sings. I am grateful to Carol Lown who purchased this
book for me when John Bell was on the EMU campus recently. Of the eleven
reasons Bell gives for singing a new song to the Lord, I want to reflect briefly on
three.
First, we sing to create an identity. There is something about singing that
enables us to express what we believe in a unified way. You have heard us
stumble through affirmations of faith in this sanctuary—some read fast, others
slowly; some follow the punctuation, others blow past the marks. But when we
sing, the music sets a rhythm and a beat that guides us to sing together. We are
given an identity by what we sing.
Some of you may have been here a few Sundays ago when a perfect
example of that was displayed in the Gathering Area. After one of my remarks
about the Cowboys and the Redskins, a group came up to me after worship, and
without saying a word, started to sing, “Hail to the Redskins.” Their song gave
them away—they were identified by what they sang.
The same happens for the church. When we sing together of God’s amazing
grace, or how God is like a mighty fortress, we identify ourselves as people who
trust in God. So music creates an identity.
But that’s not all our music does. It also shapes the future. In song, we do
not simply sing about what the Bible says, but rather we are singing about what we
hold to be true about life and God. And we do this in the hope that those who sing
the verses will believe them.
Tom Long tells the story of one of his friends who got stuck in terrible
traffic in Louisville one afternoon. As he sat there, the hymn he had sung in
worship a day or so before began to swirl through his head. It was the hymn “O
Sacred Head Now Wounded,” a very plaintive hymn of the suffering of Christ. He
was particularly struck by the line that kept returning to his thoughts—“’tis I
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deserved thy place.” And it hit him—that the woman putting on her lipstick in the
Infiniti next to him couldn’t be looked at the same anymore. Neither could any of
those around him. If Christ had died for him, he had died for them as well. The
music of the church was shaping how he was to look at those around him.
We sing about the wideness of God’s mercy or about there being no east or
west or north or south in Christ and it shapes us to form our lives to what we sing.
The future is changed by our song.
So we make our music in the church to be identified as God’s people. And
we make music to shape the future according to what we believe and sing. But we
also sing for another reason—we sing to give something of ourselves.
You are the only one who can sing your particular life to God. Your voice
can make an offering to God that no one else can bring. And that’s what these
groups are attempting to do for us—to call forth our own offerings of song to God.
When I sang in the choir at Princeton Seminary, our director was an absolute
bear in rehearsal. He would constantly stop us, insisting that we could do better.
But he also said this so often that I still hear it: “I am doing all of this with you
now so that you can offer the best gift you have to God. But after you offer it in
worship, I will not say anything about what could have been better, because it is
your offering to God. Offer it with a pure heart.”
Some of you may have heard the story of a cellist named Vedran Smailovic
who was a member of the Sarajevo Orchestra. In 1992, as he watched a group of
people standing in a bread line waiting for food during the bitter Civil War that
was ripping the Balkans apart, a mortar shell fell and killed 22 people from that
bread line.
The next day, armed with his cello, Smailovic sat down on a chair in the
center of the shell’s crater, and began to play a famous setting of Adagio in G.
Every day for 22 days, he sat in the midst of the rubble—sniper fire and other
mortars still falling—playing a song of hope. His music was a profound witness in
the midst of the brokenness to a hope greater than what anyone could see.
“My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentation. I hear the real
though far-off hymn that hails a new creation. No storm can shake my inmost
calm while to that rock I’m clinging. Since love is lord of heaven and earth, how
can I keep from singing?”
John P. Leggett
Massanutten Presbyterian Church
50 Indian Trail Road
Penn Laird, VA 22846
February 5, 2006—Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B)
(A Celebration of Massanutten’s Ministry of Music Sunday)