http://www.smaaa.org.uk/news_events/Hymnathon.html

They’re singing the entirety of the New English Hymnal, which will last approx 30 hrs. Phew! You can sponsor a hymn…and the winning hymn gets sung at the grand finale! Maybe I should have monetized the requests at TCC….

Reflections on the Christmas Season 

Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.
- Psalm 34:8

It’s Saturday after Thanksgiving. With groggy eyes and empty stomachs we pile into the family car and makes our trek over the verdant Santa Cruz Mountains to the foggy California coast. Here we pick out and chop down our Christmas tree. Like every year, my mom packs the family a picnic lunch, my dad complains about the hassle, and my sister and I get carsick. We just want to know what time we’ll be back to see our respective significant others. When we arrive our shoes get stuck in the mud and our coats soak up

My sister likes this one...

the smell of smoke from the roaring camp fire. Then we spend the next 2 hours arguing over which tree is the best one. “This one has more room for ornaments”, my mom cajoles, “This one is perfect!” insists my sister. We all join in on our prideful quest for the honor of finding the family tree. When three of us finally concede, we chop down the winning tree, cart it back home and then my sister and I dash away while my mom and dad take care of actually setting it up. Sounds wonderful? It is.

This year, with my sister studying abroad in Hong Kong, and yours truly at work and school in Boston, our family ritual is no longer. This year, my mom and dad peacefully made the drive without complaint and picked out a tree with little dispute. This year it was up in our home, star-topped and ornamented, before the kids even got home.

When I asked my mom about the tree excursion this year she exclaimed, “it was so much easier!” Which finally made me realize: it is not about the tree of course, but about my family coming together through a common task. Sure we fight about it, sure we get carsick and a little dirty, but would I trade it for a 10-minute trip to the grocery store parking lot? Absolutely not.

And if you haven’t picked up on the allegory yet, it’s like that with our church family. Like any family we can be dysfunctional at times. We fight about things and don’t always get our way, but would I trade it for a homogeneous group that thinks exactly alike? Never. The reason we have and will continue to have disputes over musical styles, preaching styles, church decorations, or any other decision to make is quite simply because we are a family. It’s what families do (and we do it really well!).

I like the term ‘growing pains’. The more I learn about the history of TCC, the more I realize that we have experienced significant growing pains. Our tensions and disagreements are evidence that we are living in a community of diversity. With more and more young families joining our church every week, the more stress is put on our volunteer staff. With more older members returning to our midst, the more we’ll want to sing the songs they know and cherish. With a greater cultural and generational diversity of people attending on any given Sunday, the wider the range of musical tastes to experience and share. It won’t always be what we individually want, but that’s not what it’s about. That’s not what we’re about.

So whether the Christmas season was met with joy and happiness, or turmoil and stress, remember that we can come together as members of one imperfect family, and God our Father is smiling down upon us, patiently perfecting us more and more every day. Alleluia!

When in our music, God is glorified
Words by Fred Pratt Green
© 1972 by Hope Publishing Co.

When in our music God is glorified,
and adoration leaves no room for pride,
it is as though the whole creation cried
Alleluia!

How often, making music, we have found
a new dimension in the world of sound,
as worship moved us to a more profound
Alleluia!

So has the Church, in liturgy and song,
in faith and love, through centuries of wrong,
borne witness to the truth in every tongue,
Alleluia!

And did not Jesus sing a psalm that night
when utmost evil strove against the Light?
Then let us sing, for whom he won the fight,
Alleluia!

Let every instrument be tuned for praise!
Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise!
And may God give us faith to sing always
Alleluia! Amen.

http://xkcd.com/988/

1) A post on the theology of space.  Today the closest thing we have to sacred space is the local apple store [case in point].  Why do our retail stores look like temples and our churches look like theaters?

2) A post on the unapologetic attack on religion in the new Jay-Z/Kanye West album, Watch the Throne.  Their lyrics are surprisingly complex.  The title of one track, “No Church in the

Watch the Throne - Jay Z / Kanye West

Wild” likely bears connection to Shakespeare’s “Julias Cesar”

“Most-anticipated track from Watch The Throne.. the title indicates an existential renunciation of organized religious worship”

From rapgenius.com

There are references to Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare, church history, and of course literal and symbolic references to their opulent lives as rap stars.  I’ll leave you with a couple of lines without interpretation at the moment.  Hopefully a post (or maybe a paper!) to come…

“Tears on the mausoleum floor, blood stains the Colosseum doors
Lies on the lips of priests, Thanksgiving disguised as a feast”

“I live by you, desire
I stand by you, walk through the fire
Your love is my scripture
Let me into your encryption”

Now who was the better tourist?  If we judge by how many sites visited, or how many pictures taken, then surely the former wins.  But if we judge by how knowledge was deepened, or how relationships were formed, then the latter made the lasting impression.

This is just how we can approach worship.  We can be spectators.  We can check off the actions, sing the songs, and go through the motions.  Or, we can dive in with all our hearts, souls, and minds and live at full-stretch[1] before God.  Tim Keller describes worship as the act of ascribing ultimate value to something in a way that engages your entire being: mind, will, and emotions[2].  When we sing together, we chew on the text and wrestle with the poetry.  When we hear scripture, we digest it and meditate on it corporately.  When we are lead in prayer, we pray actively with the leader (and might even add an amen!).  When we hear poetry, drama, music, experience other forms of art, we prepare by asking: how might this art deepen my understanding of the gospel?  And let us not forget, we share!  Communion is at its essence something shared, so let us be bold to tell one another the amazing things God has done, is doing, and will continue to do in our lives – living in and embracing the tension between the “already” and the “not-yet”.  Profoundly eschatological (our longing for “Your kingdom come”) and infinitely hopeful is the gospel of our Lord!

~~~

            A fundamental part of organizing congregational worship is to hold certain necessary tensions in balance.  Because of this bi-polar nature of worship, it is to be expected that disagreements will arise.  Consider the following dialectical tensions:

1)   Balance between the glorification of God and edification of His people

2)   Balance between the corporeal and the spiritual

3)   Balance between the emotional and the intellectual

4)   Balance between the church past and the church present

5)   Balance between being relevant and counter-cultural[3]

6)   Balance between a local community and global community

And this list could go on.  With so many layers of worship, we can expect opinions to differ.  Each of us will have a different opinion on where the church should stand on each perspective.

In John 17, Jesus says much more then “the world will know you are Christians by your love.”  He links the visible unity of his followers with the world’s perception of himself (John 17:21-23).  In other words, if the church visibly demonstrates real unity (love and togetherness that transcends serious differences) then the world will have an easier time believing that Jesus really was God, and that his blood really HAS made his followers one.  On the other hand, if Christians do not visibly demonstrate the unity that God has given them, non-Christians will find it difficult to believe that Jesus was from God. His identity will seem implausible to the world if there is no visible fruit among his followers.  People will look at our behavior and be encouraged either towards the right or the wrong doctrinal position.  What a scary responsibility!

Differences in musical preference present us with an opportunity to demonstrate unity in the church (along with differences like race, age, gender, class etc.).  Music presents us with an opportunity to love our brothers and sisters by attempting to appreciate AND participate in their particular ways of relating to God, which may differ from our own.  Isn’t it a good thing to rejoice in the fact that someone else is worshipping God in spirit and in truth – even if we would do it differently?  There is even a chance that we might begin to worship God in a new way ourselves!

Another opportunity presented by different musical tastes lies in being a counter-cultural witness to the world.  This might be the kind of thing Jesus is getting at in John 17.  We have an opportunity to present a refreshingly different picture of what community can be to the world.  Our culture tells us that people only really relate to others who are just like themselves. That is what most people expect to find when they walk into the church; old people only talking to old people, young people talking to young people etc….  Sadly, this is what most people will find in most churches (age segregation is just one example).  In contrast, the gospel tells us that what believers have in common (the death and resurrection of Christ) is so important that it transcends all the things that can divide us.  If the gospel made Jews and gentiles into one people, than surely musical preference is not a legitimate cause for disunity in the church.  If this is demonstrated, even in small ways (like people being open to the music of another), than Jesus himself will be ‘believable’ to newcomers.  If we actually lived this out, the world would be shocked by AND drawn to the church.

As the saying credited to St. Francis of Assisi goes, “preach the gospel always, use words if necessary.”  Our visible ‘one-ness’ is as important towards spreading the good news as all of the true words we speak.  By embracing these tensions and learning to worship with others unlike you we are proclaiming the upside-down nature of the Gospel.  As a worship planning committee, we seek to keep these tensions in balance, making sure we do not let any one side become an ultimate.

Think back to your last Sunday in worship.  Think about where you stand on these tensions.  What might be left out of your conception of God?  What are your burdens?  What are your joys? How can you use these to encourage the body with?  Think.  Pray.  Worship.

TCC Worship Planning Committee

Karen Johnson, Ben Keyes, Adam Kurihara, and Kristin Neprud

September 2011

Gotta love those puritan architects

After almost a year of job searching and interviews around Boston, I’m excited to begin ministry as minister of worship and music at Trinitarian Congregational Church in Wayland, MA.  Today is my final meeting with the elder board, and if all goes according to plan I should be starting within a few weeks!  In my interviews and meetings, I was initially impressed with the quality of musicians at the church, and the passion from the search committee and pastors in both maintaining the rich protestant heritage of hymns and incorporating new styles of worship.  Like any church, there will be some resistance to change at TCC, but from the feedback I’ve heard when I lead back in July, the congregation is very receptive to developing and maturing their worship in creative ways, both new and old.  I hope that I can hear the many voices of the congregation, and also remember the things I’ve been studying and thinking about for the past few years as I begin forming the services, shaping the liturgy, and teaching the choir and bands how to lead others in worship.  I’m really excited to get my feet wet in real-life church work!  Here are a few things I’m thinking about going into it.  Do let me know if you resonate with any of them in the comments:

1. The Anglican church produces worship materials on their website which will be very helpful in forming liturgies over the year.  In a small footnote at the bottom of one document titled “introductory material” it states: “The social and economic needs of the city do not fit obviously into an annual cycle in the way that the rhythms of the agricultural year do, and the pace of urban change is so rapid that we have not devised a corresponding set of urban liturgies.”  TCC is a relatively ‘low-church’ (compared to some churches in New England) in that it does not form its liturgy around the standard church year (besides advent/christmas/holy week/easter).  In this context, what is the place for a yearly liturgical cycle?  Are church seasons worth implementing to give insight into the rhythm of christian life, and if so, are the resonant with 21st century thought?

2. In September the church will be launching a saturday evening service (I’m shooting to call it evensong).  How can we avoid the downfall of discontinuity that affects many churches that offer multiple styles?  How can we maintain an identity as one church, though we offer three separate services?  What can we do as the worship planning team to unify the services and avoid a generational split?  How can we make a parishioners decision to attend one particular service a decision of our devotion to God and not a decision of our consumerist have-it-my-way identity?

3. How can we create a holistic vision for worship and arts, not simply focusing on sunday (or saturday) worship, but to encourage worship in small groups in peoples homes, at other church gatherings and events, and the sharing of our other artistic gifts (visual arts/drama/poetry)

4.  How can we produce music and other arts events that outreach to the community and share the Gospel in new and creative ways with Christians and non believers alike?  A few ideas include: weekly artist gatherings (non-confessional), a prison choir ministry, an advent or christmas concert series.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

As the story is taken directly from the history books of 1st and 2nd Kings in the Hebrew Bible, it is perfectly suited for use in church.  Anyone who has sung in a church choir will recognize some of the movements which are often excerpted as church anthems.  I hope the church can re-discover the magnificence of these large scale works of art holistically.  Within the context of a 2h30m work with all its highs and lows, the pleas of the baal worshippers are all the more desperate, and the anthem “Thanks be to God” is all the more powerful.  I also hope that the church will begin to support the production of these large scale classic works and even the composition of new ones.

Our concert was in April 2011 in symphony hall, with four fantastic soloists from BU’s school of music, and of course, our amazing teacher and conductor Ann Howard Jones.  A wonderful experience!  Thanks to all the friends that came out to share it with us.

The Rev. Peter Marshall was Chaplain of the United States senate beginning in 1947, and offering daily prayers on the senate floor until his sudden death just two years later.  One day perusing the racks at Brattle Book Shop, I stumbled upon a collection of his prayers with which he opened the senate meetings.  I didn’t realize there were prayers at every congressional session, but apparently there still are.   Here is Dr. Marshall’s prayer from July 3rd, 1947:

God of our Fathers, whose Almighty hand hath made and

preserved our Nation, grant that our people may understand what it is they celebrate tomorrow.
May they remember how bitterly our freedom was won, the down payment that was made for it, the installments that have been made since this Republic was born, and the price that must yet be paid for our liberty.
May the freedom be seen, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to please to do what is right.
May it ever be understood that our liberty is Under God and can be found nowhere else.
May our faith be something that is not merely stamped upon our coins, but expressed in our lives.
Let us, as a nation, be not afraid of standing alone for the rights of men, since we were born that way, as the only nation on earth that came into being “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.”
We know that we shall be true to the Pilgrim dream when we are true to the God they worshiped.
To the extent that America honors Thee, wilt Thou bless America, and keep her true as THou hast kept her free, and make her good as Thou hast made her rich. Amen. 

I heard a sermon yesterday that quoted this prayer of Abraham Lincoln, who set aside a national day of fasting, prayer, and humiliation during the events leading up to the civil war.

…In so much as we know that, by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Both prayers remind me somewhat of the scriptures, which often remind us not to forget God who has given us all good things.  Here is Deuteronomy 6:10-12, something we are studying at Park Street Church.

¹⁰ When the LORD your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, ¹¹ houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, ¹² be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

And Proverbs 30:

⁷ “Two things I ask of you, LORD;
do not refuse me before I die:
⁸ Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
but give me only my daily bread.
⁹ Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
and so dishonor the name of my God.

So happy 4th of July!  For what it’s worth, I’ll be eating potato salad and watching the fireworks on the Charles, but as Derek Webb reminds us:

our first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man
our first allegiance is not to democracy or blood
it’s to a King and a Kingdom!

this is what I like

Here are some thoughts:

1. Though I am not surprised by many of the words, one of the larger words below “worship,” “church,” and “music,” is the word “experiences.”  I think this says a lot about the kind of Christian I am.  I understand and relate to Jesus when I experience his love, his compassion, his majesty through music.

2. I’m glad that music is about 5 times bigger than words.  That’s all I’m going to say about that.

3. Jesus and Bach are the same size!  Of course they are.  That’s not bad theology is it?

-

First of all, at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, where I work, I sang in a Tenebrae office on wednesday, Maundy Thursday service, Good Friday mass, and Easter Mass.  Yes, as I told Eva, holy week is lucrative for church musicians.  Like like tax season for accountants, christmas for retail, and valentines day for florists, holy week for a church musician is what pays the bills and makes ends meet.  I used to feel bad about this, but considering in a few weeks I’ll be job hunting as my responsibilities will be reduced for summer months, I can use the extra pay.  Enough money talk, onto spiritual reflections.

During holy week in the catholic church, statues of the saints and the cross are veiled in a dark opaque purple.  Here’s an explanation:

Veiled cross at passiontide

The spirit of the Passiontide veiling seems to be that the Church would draw off our attention from everything but Him whose suffering [passion] she is commemorating, bidding us ‘consider Him that endured such contradiction of sinners.’  It is also symbolical of the hiding of our Lord’s glory during His earthly life, and especially during His ignominious and bitter Passion. (From “The Ritual Reason Why”, by Charles Walker)

At the office of tenebrae, the service ended in darkness.  This dramatic moment was enhanced by the organist, using the 32′ stops only, simulated sounds of an earthquake to remind us of the earthquakes that happened in the passion story.  There were two.  One when Jesus gave up his spirit in Matthew 27:50-54 :

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

⁵¹ At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split ⁵² and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.⁵³ They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and^[e] went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

⁵⁴ When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”

With the lights out, the pitch-less rumbling shook the walls of the cathedral, and brilliant flourishes on the manuals provided curtain-tearing sound effects.  The overall effect was other-worldy.  As this was the conclusion of the office, we left in silence.

On Maundy Thursday, the cardinal gave a ceremonial foot washing of 12 priests of the archdiocese.  I realized, through the ritual actions of laying prostrate before the altar, and the unified gestures of the sign of the cross and various points of kneeling before the altar, that the catholic liturgy expects the spirit to be present.  When participating in the mass, and these para-mass services, I began to get the sense that these gestures were more than empty ritual, but a powerful unified statement of worship from the Catholic

Rose window at Chartes Cathedral

church.  During the sermon, the cardinal presented a powerful image of stained glass as a metaphor for the church as a whole.  He said (and I think quoting JPII), that stained glass windows, when viewed from the outside, look drab and un-insipring.  When entering the church, and, seeing the windows from the inside looking out, we experience their dazzling radiance and intricacy.  So too is the church (and now I refer to the body of believers), often perceived from the outside as cold and uninviting (or overly inviting), it is not until we enter into the body and participate in community to we realize the intricacy and beauty of the collage of members.  I can extend the metaphor even further (and indeed people have) to say that the members of the body, like fragments of glass, may be blemished and are in no way a complete picture, but when arranged together they form a complete image.

Finally, Good Friday, at a service at Citylife church, I heard a fantastic sermon that basically preached the gospel (I can’t help but notice how the memorable element of the Evangelical service was the sermon, contrasted with the memorable moments of Catholic offices being for the most part liturgical gestures and sacraments).  That being said, it was refreshing in its simplicity, yet still thought provoking.  We mustn’t take the cross romantically, said the preacher.  I was not quite sure what he meant by that, and found it strange juxtaposed with the Good Friday mass I attended, where a majority of the service was centered around “veneration of the cross.”  During this point, the relic of the cross was brought out and displayed to the congregation, and congregants came forward and kissed the cross out of reverence and adoration.  I’m not sure if this is what the preacher meant by “romanticizing the cross,” but it was very powerful to see an actually piece of the cross where my savior hung.  Surely a sobering moment.

But he didn’t stay in the grave!  He has risen!  Lent has been a fulfilling season of reflection (and giving up facebook…which might just stick), but as Christians, we celebrate his resurrection and await his return.  As will always be the case, more thoughts on that to come.  Happy Easter everyone!