Of all the things I have written, my little essay “What Can
Miserable Christians Sing?” has provided me with so many delightful surprises
over the years.[1]
I wrote it in about 45 minutes one afternoon, infuriated by
some superficial comment about worship I had heard but which I have long since
forgotten. And yet this little piece which took minimal time and energy to
author has garnered more positive responses and more touching correspondence
than anything else I have ever written. It resonated with people across the
Christian spectrum, people from all different church backgrounds who had one
thing in common: the understanding that life has a sad, melancholy, painful
dimension which is too often ignored and sometimes even denied in our churches.
The article was intended to highlight what I saw as a major
deficiency in Christian worship, a deficiency that is evident in both
traditional and contemporary approaches: the absence of the language of lament.
The Psalms, the Bible’s own hymnbook, contains many notes of lamentation,
reflecting the nature of the believer’s life in a fallen world. And yet these
cries of pain are on the whole absent from hymns and praise songs.
The question
that formed the article’s title was thus a genuine one: What is it in the
hymnody of your church that can be sung honestly by the woman who has just lost
her baby, the husband who has just lost his wife, the child who has just lost a
parent, when they come to church on Sunday? The answer, I suggested, was the
Psalms, for in them one finds divinely inspired words which allow the believer
to express their deepest pains and sorrows to God.
Would I write it differently today? Not in terms of
substance. If anything, I would broaden its application since I believe that
its message is more important now than it was at the time of composition. As I survey
the contemporary church landscape, I am struck at how even the great gospel of
sovereign grace is now so often focused on the youth market and consequently
packaged with the aesthetics of worldly power, of celebrity,
of the kind of superficial approaches to life which mark the childish and the
immature. Things that were once (and sadly no more) the exclusive preserve of
the proponents of the prosperity gospel now feature in mainstream evangelical
circles without comment or criticism.
The world has truly been turned upside
down when Calvinism has in some quarters become known for its pyrotechnics and
its cocksure swagger.
I am also more aware now than I was when I wrote it of how
real mortality is and of how short life can be. I wrote the piece with others
in mind; now I am older and only too aware of how it applies to me and to those
I love.
The older one is, the more one is acquainted with the loss of friends
and family, and the more one’s own mortality feels like a constant and
unwelcome dinner guest. As a father I rejoiced the first time my son beat me in
a running race; but my delight in his growing
strength was short-lived when in the coming months and years I
realized it was also indicative of my own decline.
The world tells us to defy this as long as we can, whether
by fitness, fashion choices or even surgery. But the world is a malevolently plausible
confidence trickster who tells us what we want to hear. Weakness and then death
ultimately come to us all; and it is the pastor’s task to prepare both himself
and his people for the inevitable.
Thus, I now believe it is more important
than ever that the church embrace weakness and tragedy in its worship. True, we
look forward to the resurrection; but we often forget that the pathway to
resurrection is necessarily and unavoidably through death. We need to remind
our people in both what we preach, what we pray and what we sing as a
congregation that God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness—and, where
resurrection is concerned, in and through our total weakness at the hands of
death.
Since writing the original piece, I have also become more
aware of the power of liturgy to shape the mind of a Christian congregation. I
am not talking here only of formal liturgies such as those in The Book
of Common Prayer. I mean the form and content of any worship service
claiming to be Christian. That which we say and sing as a congregation will
over time subtly and imperceptibly inform our thinking about the Christian
faith and thus about life in general in a powerful way. That is why an emphasis
on the aesthetics of power and youth—perhaps we might say liturgies of
power and youth—are problematic. They exclude the old or delude them into
thinking that they are not old; and they deceive the young into thinking that
they are the center of the universe and are destined to live forever. A liturgy
which accurately reflects the expectations we can have for life in a fallen
world, one that inculcates and reinforces that week by week, is important as a
means of preparing our people for the suffering that must eventually come their
way.
And that brings me once more to the psalms.
True, there are Christian poets and even the occasional hymn writer who have
captured the dark complexities of life; but there are none to compare with
authors of the Psalter who set forth the riches and depths of human experience
and existence with perfect poetic pitch. The church which makes the psalms part
of her regular diet provides her people with the resources for truly living in
this vale of tears, just as the church which does not do so has perversely
denied her people a true treasure in pursuit of what? Relevance? There is
nothing more universally relevant than preparing people for suffering and
death.
I have people in my congregation who have very hard lives, lives that
are not going to become easier over time. To them I can only say: suffering
comes to us all, but there is a resurrection; listen to how the notes of real,
present lament in the Psalms are suffused with tangible, future hope and be
encouraged: weeping may tarry for the night, and indeed be truly painful while
it does, but joy will come in the morning.
When I married a young couple in my congregation a few
years ago, I commented in the sermon that all human marriages begin with joy
but end in tragedy. Whether it is divorce or death, the human bond of love is
eventually torn apart. The marriage of Christ and his church, however, begins
with tragedy and ends with a joyful and loving union which will never be rent asunder.
There is joy to which we point in our worship, the joy of the Lamb’s wedding
feast. But our people need to know that in this world there will be mourning.
Not worldly mourning with no hope. But real mourning nonetheless, and we must
make them ready for that.
Still, as I look back to the original “Miserable
Christians” piece, I never imagined I would still be commenting on it so many
years later. I am grateful that it seems to have been a help and encouragement
to so many.
[1] “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?”
in The Wages Of Spin: Critical Writings on Historical and Contemporary
Evangelicalism (Christian Focus, 2005), 157-63.
This article originally appeared here.
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