Sing to God a New
Song
January 3, 2021
Psalm 96 begins, “Sing to the Lord a new song….”[1]
NRSV. When I read that line recently I thought, why a new song? Why not
stick with the old songs we know and love? I mean, in my experience church
people get upset when a worship service includes a hymn they don’t know. I
can’t tell you how many times someone told me after a service I had put
together and led, “We don’t know that song.” They rarely if ever meant that
line as a compliment or an expression of thanks for introducing the
congregation to something new. It’s nearly always a complaint. In one small
church I served the people even took away my right to choose the hymns for my
own worship services, something that played not a small part in my decision to
leave that church. In that congregation not even people with some musical
ability wanted to sing anything they didn’t already know. So why not go along
with them, find out which hymns most of them know, and only use those ones?
Well, there actually are several very good reasons not to do that. I’ll start
with the less important ones and move to the more important ones.
First, like I tried to tell the
people of that little congregation that wouldn’t let me choose the hymns, the
hymns that are old standards to you weren’t always old and weren’t always
standard. At some point some congregations sang them when they were new and
people didn’t know them. If no congregation ever sang them when they were new
you’d never have heard and sung them yourselves. While that truth may seem
obvious to many of us, that little congregation didn’t find it at all
persuasive.
Then there’s the problem that
worship, while familiar, can get pretty stale when it consists only of the same
old pieces over and over again. Yes, familiarity is comfortable and repetition
reinforces learning; but those truths shouldn’t dictate that nothing new is
ever used in worship. At some point people like me will groan, “Not that one
again! Didn’t we just sing that one a few weeks ago?” New material, if it’s
good musically and theologically, helps keep things fresh. It wakes people up
and maybe even gets them to think some about what they’re singing. Horrors! A
congregation that thinks new thoughts! Heaven forbid! That at least is how far
too many church people think of it.
Then there’s the really big reason
to sing a new song to God. Music, like every other artistic creation, speaks
from and to the particular cultural context in which it is created. Great artistic
creations transcend their specific cultural contexts, but cultural contexts
aren’t static. They constantly evolve. Music that sounded good to people in one
cultural context may not sound good at all to people in a different context.
How many people today really enjoy Gregorian chants? I might appreciate them at
some level, but they’re hardly the music I choose to listen to for pleasure or
for edification. To my contemporary ears they are quite frankly pretty boring.
The world has moved beyond Gregorian chants.
When it comes to hymns, the issue
of musical style is important; but there is another issue that is even more
important. It is the issue of the lyrics of the hymns. Most of the hymns most
people sing in the mainline Protestant churches today were written in the
nineteenth century or even earlier. The lyrics use conventions of the time when
they were written. Many of us today find those conventions offensive and unacceptable.
Perhaps the aspect of the lyrics of the old hymns that troubles me and a great
many other people today most is their use of exclusively male language for God
and for people. In the hymns most Christians sing God is always “He.” These
hymns call God Father but never Mother. They feature the God of classical
theism, a great father-figure in the sky who is most definitely male not
female. They also use words like son and brother for people and call all human
beings collectively “man.” Some people, even some women, defend this exclusive
use of words like these by saying that
they’re not offended by them and that they understand them to include everyone.
Yet God is not male, and as the great Elizabeth Johnson has taught us, female
images for God like Mother work as well and as badly to mean God as do male
images like Father. When in worship I hear the word “brother” used to refer to
people generally I look at the people of the congregation and think there are
all sorts of people here who aren’t anyone’s brother and never will be because
they are girls and women not boys and men. Using exclusively male language for
God and for people just doesn’t work for a great many of us today.
Another objection many of us have
to the traditional language of our hymns is its use of images of male power and
domination. The good people who wrote that language into their hymns had no
problem with calling Jesus Lord and King. Many people today, however, object to
that usage on two grounds. One is that those terms are exclusively male. The
other is that they smack of dominance and control rather than of covenant and
love. I have continued to use Lord for Jesus because it really has no other
connotation in our context today, and it points to Jesus as the one we are to
obey and to follow; but I understand and respect this objection to the term.
Then there’s the problem of our
hymns’ use of obsolescent familiar pronouns. They are full of the words “Thee,”
“Thy,” “Thou,” and “Thine.” We don’t use those words any more except when we’re
talking about God. They sound stilted and unfamiliar. Worse, few people today
understand what they actually are. To most people they sound formal,
respectful, even sacred because we apply them only to God. When they were in
common use however those words were nothing of the sort. They were the familiar
form of second person singular pronouns. “You” and “yours” were formal, “thou”
and “thine” were informal. They were used with family and close friends. “Thou”
is the English equivalent of the German “du,” the French “tu,” and the Russian “ty.”
Christians applied these words to God because they saw God as their heavenly
Father, and one used familiar pronouns with one’s father. I don’t mean to
suggest that we shouldn’t have a relationship with God that is familiar, but
these words have fallen out of use in English. We don’t need them making our
hymns sound obsolete.
More over, some of our standard hymns
have lyrics that express what many of us today consider to be bad theology.
Many of them are more about pie in the sky by and by when we die than they are
about how God wants us to live our lives on earth. Many of them express the
classical theory of atonement, the hoary notion that Jesus is our Savior
because he suffered and died to pay a price that God demanded be paid before
God could or would forgive human sin. Many of us today reject that theology in
favor of one that sees Jesus as God’s revelation of God’s unshakable solidarity
with us humans in whatever comes our way in life and of God’s dream of what
life on earth can and should be.
For all of these reasons and
perhaps for many more Psalm 96’s call to us to sing to God a new song speaks
powerfully from the distant past to our contemporary world. We need new songs
to sing to and about God. Many such songs are being written, but except for the
simplistic, repetitive praise songs of popular evangelical Christianity (songs
I once heard an expert on church music call “not weight-bearing music”) few
Christians know them. Yet composers like, among others, Thomas Troeger and
Brian Wren have written and published contemporary Christian hymns that reflect
the changed world in which we live. They give us new ways of speaking about
God. To illustrate the point I will discuss what I consider to be the greatest
of those more or less contemporary hymns, Brian Wren’s “Bring Many Names.”[2]
“Bring Many Names” is, I admit, already
thirty-two years old. It dates from 1989. Yet that makes it much younger than
most of the hymns in most denominational hymnals. It reflected a changing
ecclesial world in 1989, and it still speaks powerfully to that world today.
The lyrics are set to a tune by Carlton Young called Westchase that Young wrote
specifically for Wren’s words. In that hymn Wren plays with how various aspects
of human living can give us new insights into the nature of God.
The hymn has six stanzas. The first
introduces the idea of our using many different names and images for God. It
begins, “Bring many names, beautiful and good….” The lyrics then do bring many
names. They are:
Strong mother God
Warm father God
Old aching God
Young growing God
Great living God
You can see that Wren had done some very interesting things
here. He names God mother. In that verse he describes mother God as strong and
as God at work in creation. The verse ends by calling mother God “genius at
play.” Then Wren gives us father God, but this father God is hardly the
heavenly Father of classical Christianity. He is “warm father God.” He hugs
every child and forgives us until we’re reconciled. Wren has flipped cultural
stereotypes of mothers and fathers and in doing so opens our minds to rich new
ways of thinking about God.
Next wren uses stages of human life
to gives us more powerful new images of God. Verse 4 begins, “Old aching God,
grey with endless care.” In Wren’s lyric this God calmly pierces evil’s new
disguises and is wiser than despair. Verse 5 begins “Young, growing God, eager,
on the move.” This God, among other things, cries out for justice and gives all
God has to give in that cause. The final verse, verse 6, contains what I
consider to be the best theology of any verse in any hymn I’ve ever known: “Great
living God, never fully known, joyful darkness far beyond our seeing, closer
yet than breathing, everlasting home.” I can’t imagine a better, more concise
summation of what I believe about God. We see that in addition to being a fine
poet Wren is a very fine theologian. Verse 6 of “Bring Many Names” expresses
the mystery of God better than any other few words I’ve ever heard anywhere.
Wren published “Bring Many Names”
in 1989. It really could hardly have been written much before that time. It
reflects and speaks of and to a Christianity in transition. It calls God
mother. It calls God old. Some people find those images offensive. When I first
discovered “Bring Many Names” in The New Century Hymnal of the
United Church of Christ, which came out in 1995, I said to my denomination’s
regional executive at the time that that hymn alone was good enough reason for
churches to buy the new hymnal. She replied “Yes, but for some people that hymn
alone is good enough reason not to.”
Change is hard. We humans resist
it, yet as the old adage says the only thing that is constant is change. Our
ancient Christian faith is still with us today because it has been able to
adapt itself to a great many cultural shifts and transformed contexts for the
past two thousand years. It is doing it again today. Yes, most Christians still
live in the cultural and religious past. As John Dominic Crossan once wrote,
not all people who live at the same time are contemporaries. Yet it is clearly
time for a new song for us to sing to God. There are lots of new songs out
there that are well worth singing. Go find them. Get your church to sing them. Perhaps
get your pastor to preach on them if, that is, your pastor will evaluate them
positively. In these days of a shift in
our cultural tectonic plates we must indeed sing a new song to God. May it be
so.
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