Rote Corporate Confession?

December 13, 2013UncategorizedDave

Christianity Today has a new “open question” piece on “Why Confess Sins in Worship When It Seems So Rote?”

One of the responses is from Calvin Institute of Christian Worship director John Witvliet, who ends with a nod to the Psalms:

The church is blessed today with artists, musicians, pastors, and others who have a renewed vision for shaping honest, grace-immersed corporate prayer and confession. Many are doing so by returning to the Psalms, the Bible’s own school of prayer. Psalm 32 celebrates forgiveness, proclaiming, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven” (NRSV). Psalm 38, 51, 69, and 130 explore similar themes. May God’s Spirit bless these worship leaders with congregations willing to embrace their vision.

All three responses (the others two are by Kathleen Norris and Enuma Okoro) are worth reading, but I wish CT had solicited an opinion from someone who is against corporate confession since that is probably the majority opinion among evangelicals.

What really stuck out to me was the assumption in CT‘s question: Why Confess Sins in Worship When It Seems So Rote? Who says confessing sins seems rote? Our services at Trinity have a section called “We Are Renewed in God’s Grace” that typically includes a confession of sin and assurance of pardon, but what these consist of varies from week to week. (The CRC’s Worship Sourcebook contains eight possible elements of Confession and Assurance, viz., call to confession, prayers of confession, lament, assurance of pardon, the peace, thanksgiving, the law, dedication, with dozens of examples of each, many keyed to the church year.) Sometimes we use a hymn as a confession; if not, we sing a hymn of response. There’s no need to be repetitive without reason.

But there is nothing wrong with repetition either. Here’s the confession we used at the beginning of the worship service each Sunday when I was a kid:

Most merciful God, we confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen.

(This is from the Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 56. Lift Up Your Hearts #640 is a variant of this prayer taken from The Book of Common Worship.)

These words may be “rote” if we say them without thinking. But if we take them seriously and enter imaginatively into them, they should inspire us to honestly consider the many ways we have failed and to reflect upon God’s grace. Believing they are “rote” seems like a failure of imagination.

Joyeux Noël

December 12, 2013Movie reviewDave

After watching Joyeux Noël Tuesday night at our Areopagus Christmas gathering, I can recommend it highly for your own campus ministry holiday-themed movie night or other event. (I’ve been selecting the films for our monthly Areopagus movie night this year, but Naomi gets credit for this selection.)

Joyeux Noël is based on the Christmas Truce of 1914—actually a series of local ceasefires negotiated by troops all along the Western Front just five months after the start of World War I. The movie focuses on on three neighboring military units: a Scottish unit featuring two gung-ho brothers and their local priest, who works as a “stretcher-bearer; a French unit whose commander left behind a pregnant wife in now German-occupied territory; and a German unit with a Jewish commander and a private, Nikolaus Sprink, who was a famous opera singer before the war.

The opera singer’s partner/lover, Anna Sørensen (Diane Kruger), convinces the German crown prince to arrange for the pair to sing together at a party for officers. Sprink and Sørensen then sneak to the front to sing for Sprink’s unit. Their singing is joined by bagpipes from the Scottish troops and eventually Sprink, with Christmas tree in hand, walks singing into No Man’s Land. Soon the three commanders have agreed to a temporary cease-fire and the troops have poured into No Man’s Land. The soldiers share food and drinks, play cards and soccer, gather and bury bodies, and exchange addresses so they can meet again after the war—just as their real-life counterparts did. Connections between some of the characters are revealed.

The film only hints at the brutality that would follow the end of the truce. (Presumably most of the men would be dead by the end of the war four years later.) What is shown is the harsh response to the truce by military higher-ups. (The truce in the film lasted a couple days. In some areas it continued into the new year.) Commanders were re-assigned and units were moved or even split up.

The film depicts two worship services. During Christmas Eve, the Scottish priest leads a Latin mass in No Man’s Land to a huge gathering of intermingled Germans, French and Scottish, and Sørensen sings “Ave Maria.”

After the truce, a British bishop castigates the priest and orders him home. The bishop then leads a service for replacement troops, telling them that they have a duty to kill the Germans, who are not children of God.

One of the students quipped that this is the sort of thing that gives religion a bad name, but it seems to me that God-loves-my-country-best religion will always have plenty of supporters.

Psalm 122

December 10, 2013Psalms for All SeasonsDave

I’m going to circle back to the beginning of our Psalms for All Seasons class when we looked at Psalm 122, which the Revised Common Lectionary assigns to the First Sunday of Advent for Year A.

The psalm is written from the perspective of someone standing in Jerusalem, remembering the beginning of the long pilgrimage.

I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the LORD.” Now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.

The pilgrim admires Jerusalem, which unites the worship of the Lord with the justice of the king, and calls for his companions to pray for peace for the city.

The responsorial setting for the psalm in Psalms for All Seasons is “I Was Glad When They Said To Me” (PFAS #122) which is from a composition by David Haas and is written to be sung as a canon.

There are four other settings of Psalms 122 in Psalms for All Seasons. My favorite, which we ultimately sang in church during the First Week of Advent, was “Rejoice, Rejoice, Come Sing With Me” (PFAS #122A). We used it as an opening hymn with Joseph Slegers as our song leader. Each line consists of a leader’s part, followed by a response from the congregation. The response is “This is the house of God” for the first stanza and “We seek the peace of God” for the second. The text doesn’t keep closely to Psalm 122 so we used the psalm as a call to worship and responded with the hymn.

The remaining settings have very different moods. “I Rejoiced When I Heard Them Say” (PFAS #122B/LUYH #508) is a somber hymn by Bernadette Farrell that follows the text of the psalm closely in its five stanzas. The refrain of “Shalom, shalom, the peace of God be here/Shalom, shalom, God’s justice be ever near” could also be used as a response. (Here’s a sample of the song.)

Much more joyful are “Let Us Go Rejoicing” (PFAS #122E) by Bob Hurd, which doesn’t appear in Lift Up Your Hearts, and “With Joy I Heard My Friends Exclaim” (PFAS #122F/LUYH #66), which does. The latter has lyrics from the 1912 Psalter (but apparently didn’t appear in earlier CRC hymnals) and is set to the English carol SUSSEX CAROL.

Other CRC hymnals include several other settings of Psalm 122, which we didn’t sing in class.

Lift Up Your Hearts also includes a short chorus based on verse 1: “I Was Glad” (LUYH #514), by M. Thomas Thangaraj, who has written hymns in Tamil for use in India.

The gray Psalter Hymnal has one setting of Psalm 122, “I Was Glad When They Came to Call Me” (PH87 #122). The blue Psalter Hymnal has three: “My Soul Was Glad” (PH57, #262), “With Joy and Gladness in My Soul” (PH57, #263), and “My Heart Was Glad to Hear the Welcome Sound” (PH57, #264).

Psalm 121

December 10, 2013Psalms for All SeasonsDave

Each week this semester we’ve been meeting in the sanctuary of our church during the Sunday School hour to read, discuss and sing Psalms. Our main hymnal has been Psalms for All Seasons, but anything in a Christian Reformed Church hymnal is fair game.

Our Psalm for this past Sunday (Dec. 8) was 121. We were displaced from the sanctuary by children practicing for next week’s Christmas lessons and carols service so we met in the Sunday School music room and Andrew played on the small upright piano there.

Psalm 121 is assigned by the Revised Common Lectionary to Second Sunday of Lent in Year A so one of the songs we sang may appear in our March 16 service.

Psalm 121 is the second of the Songs of Ascents, which were sung during pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and fits thematically between Psalm 120 and 122. Psalm 120 is about where we start our journey: from our “dwelling among those who hate peace.” Psalm 122 looks back at the beginning of the journey from the perspective of a pilgrim now standing within the gates of Jerusalem. Psalm 121 has the pilgrims anticipating their journey to Jerusalem and the dangers they will encounter.

The first line, “I lift up my eyes to the hills [or mountains]” has several possible meanings. I’ve thought of the hills as the first of the dangers listed in the psalm and a shorthand expression for all of them. “I lift up my eyes to the hills I’m going to be traveling and anticipate the dangers they contain.”

Another interpretation sees the hills as bad for another reason: they are filled with monuments to idol worship. “I lift up my eyes to the idols on the hills, but my help doesn’t come from them but from the LORD.” A third interpretation has mountains, viz., Zion, as God’s home. “I lift up my eyes to the mountains of Jerusalem—and above into the heavens where God is enthroned.”

The rest of the psalm describes the dangers of the journey—stumbling on rocks, heat from the sun, madness from the moon, evil (robbers and such)—and affirms that the Lord will protect us from them. The section about the Lord never sleeping probably references the Canaanite belief that the gods slept and had to be awakened (cf., the priests of Baal in their competition with Elijah). “Your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore” in verse 8 is a beautiful parallelism of “your life” in verse 9.

A good discussion of psalm can be found in Eugene Peterson’s book on the Songs of Ascents, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (1980).

The promise of the psalm—and both Hebrews and Christians have always read it this way—is not that we shall never stub our toes, but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us. (p. 38)

Psalms for All Seasons includes a responsorial setting for each psalm found in the RCL. These consist of short verses we sing as a refrain periodically during our reading of the psalms.

The Psalm 121 responsorial setting is “My Help Comes Only From the Lord” (PFAS #121D), which is one of the strangest we’ve encountered so far and seems rather grim. A refrain from another setting might work better for some services (see below).

Psalms for All Seasons includes seven other hymns based on Psalm 121. Most of them stick closely to the text of the psalm.

Of the older hymns, our favorite was “To the Hills I Lift My Eyes” (PFAS #121A/LUYH #331/PH87 #121/PH57 #260), which also appears in Lift Up Your Hearts and its two most recent predecessors. Its lyrics are derived from the 1912 Psalter, the first English language hymnbook authorized for use in the CRC.

Another hymn with lyrics from the 1912 Psalter is the awkwardly titled “I to the Hills Will Lift My Eyes” (PFAS #121E), which is set to an Appalachian tune (UNION).

All the other 121 settings in PFAS were written during the past 25 years.

Our favorite of these was Brian Doerksen’s “I Lift My Eyes Up to the Mountains” (PFAS #121H/LUYH #652/SNC #208), which we’ve sung during worship from Sing! A New Creation and which also appears in Lift Up Your Hearts. (The PFAS performance notes note that “The Fine on the G chord does not resolve. This is intentional, reflecting a sense of waiting and anticipation in the text.” This aspect of the song led to a discussion about the effectiveness of this technique and what other songs employ it.) There are multiple versions of the song on YouTube.

The third (of three) Psalm 121 settings that appears in Lift Up Your Hearts is Richard Smallwood’s gospel song “Total Praise” (PFAS #121B/ LUYH #420). Several performances of the song on YouTube are in a gospel style we were unable to replicate with our small group. Here is one by the Howard Gospel Choir. (Here is the official PFAS sample.)

The other English-language hymn is “Our Help Is from the Lord” (PFAS #121I), which has a catchy 6/8 refrain but more difficult stanzas. It might work well with a soloist or small group singing the stanzas. We also thought the refrain might work as a responsorial setting.

The remaining settings in PFAS are a Spanish song, “Alzo a los montes mis ojos”/”Lift Your Eyes Up to the Mountains” (PFAS #121C), and a Korean song “Naega sanul hyanghayo/To the Hills I Lift My Eyes” (PFAS #121F), which has a tricky rhythm. (Its performance notes claims that “This beautifully spare song is better ‘caught than taught.’”) Here is a sample of “Naega sanul hyanghayo.”

The 1987 Psalter Hymnal includes a pair of settings that were not included in the recent CRC hymnals. “I Lift My Eyes Up to the Hills” (PH87 #180) is set to GENEVAN 121 (i.e., the tune the psalm was set to in the 1551 Genevan Psalter). The rhythm was difficult to sing; it is the only tune in the Psalter Hymnal with a 866 887 meter. “I Lift Up My Eyes to the Mountains” (PH87 #448/PH57 #261) was better, but the LUYH editors definitely picked the best of the three Psalter Hymnal settings (“To the Hills I Lift My Eyes”) for the new hymnal.

The Blue 1957 Psalter Hymnal contained three Psalm 121 settings. The one that was not picked up for the 1987 Psalter was “Unto the Hills I Lift Mine Eyes” (PH57 #259); we didn’t try to sing it.

Psalms for All Seasons also includes a benediction (121G) by John Witvliet that would work well as a closing blessing:

May the Lord watch over you—
your going out and coming in,
your sleeping and waking,
your labor and your rest,
your dying and your rising.
Truly, the Lord will keep your life—forever. Amen.

Why Earth and All Stars?

December 9, 2013UncategorizedDave

This blog is an outgrowth of the ministries I’m involved at Trinity Christian Reformed Church in Ames, Iowa, especially the adult Sunday School classes I’ve taught the past two years with Andrew and Naomi Friend.

Currently, I am teaching with Andrew a class called Psalms for All Seasons, which uses the hymnal of that name as its primary text. Each week we take one Psalm (working our way through the Revised Common Lectionary but several weeks ahead), read it, discuss it, and sing multiple settings of it while Andrew accompanies on piano or organ. So an immediate purpose of this blog is to record what we’re learning about the Psalms and their musical settings each week and to be a place for us (and anyone else who is interested) to discuss them.

I also hope to use this blog to share what we learn in other ministries I’m involved in, including:

• The Sunday School classes I’ve taught with Naomi (more on that later)

• Worship planning (with plenty about Lift Up Your Hearts)

• Children & Worship

• Summer Book Club

• Areopagus (our campus ministry based at Iowa State)

It may also touch upon some of my other interests: gender & the Bible, the intersection of religion and academia, CRC synodical meetings, and such.

The blog is named after one of my favorite hymns, “Earth and All Stars” (LUYH #271/PH87 #433/HFW #225), which is personally significant to me for several reasons.

I sang the hymn growing up from the Lutheran Book of Worship (#558); the lyrics were written by Lutheran pastor Herbert Brokering, a graduate of Wartburg College in Iowa (my current state of residence). I encountered the song again in the Psalter Hymnal when we started worshiping at Hessel Park CRC in Champaign, Illinois, during graduate school and then here at Trinity.

The lyrics are in the spirit of Psalm 148, where all of nature and humanity is called upon to praise God. The Psalter Hymnal Handbook refers to it as a “catalog text, inviting us to join with a whole host of natural and cultural phenomena to ‘sing to the Lord a new song!’” Other examples of this hymn type include “All Creatures of Our God and King” (LUYH #551/PH87 #431/HFW #41/SWM #14), “Praise the LORD, Sing Hallelujah” (LUYH #6/PFAS #148C/PH87 #188/PH57 #304), and other hymns based on Psalm 148.

The first four stanzas cover the heavens (1), weather (2), musical instruments (3) and technology (4). The fifth stanza is about university life:

Classrooms and labs! Come boiling test tubes!

Sing to the Lord a new song!

Athlete and band! Loud cheering people!

Sing to the Lord a new song!

Brokering wrote the song for the 90^th anniversary of St. Olaf College, and because of its academic theme, we often sing it during the beginning of the school year.

The sixth stanza’s line “Children of God, dying and rising” make it appropriate for funerals. We sang it at our son’s funeral and I’ve requested that Andrew play it at mine (with all the stops pulled out).

Lift Up Your Hearts includes an Easter variant called “Alleluia! Jesus is Risen” (LUYH #204) with lyrics by Brokering and using the same tune by David Johnson. I’m looking forward to singing it.

Who might be interested in this blog?

• Members of our Psalms for All Seasons Sunday School class

• People interested in incorporating art and music into adult Sunday School classes

• People fascinated by Christian Reformed hymnody

• My parents (maybe)

• Justin Struik and Fred Haan