Hymns For the 21st Century

Something peculiar is happening with Christian music.


First, it comes in many styles, and has for several decades. Christian rap. Christian country. Christian rock. Praise and worship. Urban gospel. Southern gospel (add your style here). Many of us like some songs from each of these formats. 


But for several years now I have seen that young Christians (of my children's generation) are drawn to the textual richness of hymns. There's something about the "hymn form" that seems to allow for expanded reflection and poetic artistry. We could argue about the technical definition of a hymn, but we'll leave that for another forum.


A very good recent song that "feels like a hymn" is IN CHRIST ALONE, by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend (copyright 2001, Thankyou Music). Of the Christian songs written in the past ten years, this is one of the few that may survive to be used for 100 years or more.


Indelible Grace ( www.igracemusic.com ) is another mini-movement worth noting. College pastor (and skilled musician) Kevin Twit has led a number of Nashville musicians (including Jars of Clay) to create 21st-century musical settings for great old hymns (some of them very obscure). The result is at least six compact discs that surprise and delight me.


I see that Gary Chapman operates a website ( www.ahymnaweek.com ) that seeks to publicize these old public domain hymns to a new audience as well.


The hymn-poems of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley and Anne Steele are not essential ingredients of Jesus' Good News. But they are delightful creations that can enrich our times of worship and private devotion. GO HYMNS!

Easter Saturday

This from guest blogger Shannon Hicks, a first-rate essayist (and my oldest daughter) :

For Christians, holy week is all about remembering and celebrating. There’s Maundy Thursday when we remember Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, Good Friday when we remember his trip to Golgotha and the dark day of his death. And then, of course, there’s Easter Sunday when we celebrate the miracle of resurrection. All of this remembering and celebrating is good, but I wonder why we never give a second thought to Saturday. Plain old, ordinary Saturday… that pause, that middle place between what may well be the most terrible day in history and the most triumphant.

The Bible is almost silent on the events of Saturday. Three of the gospels never mention it at all, and Matthew tells us only that Saturday was the day when Jesus’ grave was reinforced and guarded to avoid a resurrection scam by his desperate followers. I wonder where the disciples were on Saturday… what they were doing and what they were thinking. I imagine that there was a lot of grief, a lot of effort made to go through the motions of normal life. I imagine feelings of disappointment and betrayal (“we thought this guy was the Messiah… where is the kingdom that he promised?”). Maybe there was a twinge of hope flitting about the edge of their consciousness, but I hardly believe this was the prevailing emotion of the day.

With the benefit of hindsight, maybe we see Saturday a bit differently. We know what’s coming, so the expectation is palpable. The grief is real, the terror is real… but it is not the end. We believe, we know, that death will be swallowed up in victory. But still, Saturday is a waiting time.

If I’m honest, I have to admit that much of my life is spent living like it’s Saturday. I believe that redemption is possible… that individuals and families and communities and social structures can change. I believe that mercy can triumph over judgment. I believe that grace and healing and deliverance are real and that they are powerful. I pray for these things. I work for them in the ways that I think are best. But I still find myself in the middle place where reality and expectation collide, where life experience and future hope aren’t always woven together as seamlessly as I would like them to be.

And I think that this is ok. Is it important to linger at the cross and experience the depth of darkness that Good Friday brings? I think so. Is it important to linger at the empty tomb and revel in the miracle of Easter Sunday? Absolutely. But I think that the pause in between is important too. If we want to take our faith seriously, I think we must learn how to live well on Saturday.

(Shannon and her nephew Caleb)

At the Cross with California Girls

Today we commemorate the ultimate hinge of history. This is Good Friday, the day in Holy Week when Jesus' death for us is remembered and solemnly observed.

Early this morning, I met with five other men at a local diner. We come together on Friday mornings to pray and study the Bible. We are a "Ten-Man Table" of Waterboyz for Jesus, a local men's ministry that involves several hundred men each week.

This morning's scripture was John 19, part of the crucifixion narrative. We read the chapter aloud, then turned our attention to writing down individual observations. Soon we would share with each other in turn.

Several of us focused on Jesus' statements from the cross:
(a) To Mary: "Woman, behold your son."
(b) To John: "Behold your mother."
(c) To those nearby: "I thirst."
(d) To all of creation: "It is finished."

The time had come for our meeting to close with prayer.

Suddenly the silent jukebox came to life:

"Well, east coast girls are hip, I really dig those styles they wear
And the southern girls with the way they talk, they knock me out when I'm down there,
The mid-west farmers' daughters really make you feel alright,
And the northern girls with the way they kiss, they keep their boyfriends warm at night.
I WISH THEY ALL COULD BE CALIFORNIA
I WISH THEY ALL COULD BE CALIFORNIA
I WISH THEY ALL COULD BE CALIFORNIA GIRLS..."

I had to laugh!

My attention was immediately diverted. We had been focused on the Word of God, communicating spiritual ideas, but suddenly I was distracted.

I had to plug my ears as I closed in prayer.

And I glimpsed a bigger truth.

On this holy day (and every day) my attention is easily drawn away from "The Main Thing." A snatch of music or a photograph carries me away from the holy to the mundane, from the sublime to the inconsequential.

I've been forgiven of my sins, reborn into God's family, filled with His life and love. I've been called to glorify Him, to love Him, to serve Him and enjoy Him forever.

But if all I can rely on is my own virtue, I am weak and needy. I am still broken, still vulnerable.

I must be forever vigilant. There are "foes without and within." When I am spiritually at ease, I become an easy mark for the enemy, easily tempted, easily drawn away.

God help me. God have mercy on me.

"I need Thee every hour!"

Frank's Tractor

This is a 1949 Ford  8N tractor.

Like the one my father-in-law Frank owns.

But Frank's tractor has been used hard, and isn't quite as pretty as this one.

So Frank is fixing up his tractor. He has installed a new carbureter. He's using plenty of Bondo for body fill, and is repainting his, step by painful step.

Frank is almost 82 years old. He doesn't drive anymore, and last winter was a difficult one for him. His eyesight is failing, and he uses a cane to get around. Most of last winter he sat in his little house, tended his wood stove and watched TV. A few old friends would come by to visit, but winter can be tough on octogenarians.

Frank has been an active person all his life -- a union carpenter, a coon hunter, a dog man. He has trained blue ticks and walkers and leopard curs and beagles. But last year he had to give the last of his dogs away.

Now it's springtime. The sun is warm, the blossoms are out, and just recently I saw eleven deer in a field out near his place.

Frank is so glad to be able to go outside and tinker around. He loves spring, and he's getting ready to put in a bunch of tomato plants, with electric fence around them to keep the deer away.

I love Frank, and my wife loves him even more. He's her dad.

She stops by in the mornings on her way to work to help him with his nitro patch. She cleans his house and takes him to the doctor. We take him to oyster dinners, which I've told you about previously. (Here's Frank with our daughter at her wedding in 2005.)

If I live to be 82, I want to be active. I don't want a tractor, but I want to go on vigorous walks every day. I want meaningful work to do. I want good books to read. I want to keep busy -- body, mind and spirit. I want to be in touch with my kids and grandkids. I want to be like Doris Haddock, who walked 3,200 miles at 89 years of age. (http://grannyddoc.com/index.htm ).

What's your plan for living productively in your 80s and beyond?

The Wild Side of Curling

Who were those guys with the Loudmouth pants? 


And who ever thought up this crazy game?


During the 2010 Winter Olympics. the Norwegian Men's Curling Team gained notoriety for their red white and blue diamond pants. A Facebook fan page created for Norway's pants drew more than 500,00 fans during the games.


Many Americans knew little or nothing about curling until the Winter Olympics. By now we have perhaps forgotten the little we knew.

Like golf, curling originated in Scotland in late medieval times (before 1500 AD). One of those old guys said, "Why don't we start sliding 40-pound stones across the ice?" And a second guy said, "Great idea!  I'll get me wife's broom and sweep away those ice chips along the way!"


Traditionally, all of the granite for curling stones comes from the island of Ailsa Craig, on Scotland's west coast.


Firmly established in Canada (perhaps our second-most-played ice sport), it provides a good excuse for people to get together and drink alcoholic beverages. Popular as well in Minnesota, Sweden, Switzerland, and now New Zealand and Australia. World championships have been held since 1959.

Those wild pants were created by Loudmouth Golf, an American company (check them out on Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudmouth_Golf ).


Let's get together and play an end sometime! 

Anne Rice: Journey to Faith in Jesus Christ

I am not a fan of vampires or of Anne Rice. 


But I recently read her audio book "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession," in which she recounts her spiritual journey from strict Roman Catholicism to atheism to faith in Jesus Christ.


It's an interesting story. For a number of years she yearned for a God in whom she could not quite believe. But her atheism was slipping away, and she was powerfully drawn toward Jesus Christ Himself. She writes: 


"In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from [God] for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I’d been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul. He wasn’t going to let anything happen by accident! Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake." (Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, p. 183)


In a Washington Post blog (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2008/03/go_tell_it_on_the_mountain_aga.html) she writes:

Look: I believe in Him. It’s that simple and that complex. I believe in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the God Man who came to earth, born as a tiny baby and then lived over thirty years in our midst. I believe in what we celebrate this week: the scandal of the cross and the miracle of the Resurrection. My belief is total. And I know that I cannot convince anyone of it by reason, anymore than an atheist can convince me, by reason, that there is no God.

A long life of historical study and biblical research led me to my belief, and when faith returned to me, the return was total. It transformed my existence completely; it changed the direction of the journey I was traveling through the world. Within a few years of my return to Christ, I dedicated my work to Him, vowing to write for Him and Him alone. My study of Scripture deepened; my study of New Testament scholarship became a daily commitment. My prayers and my meditation were centered on Christ.

And my writing for Him became a vocation that eclipsed my profession as a writer that had existed before.

Why did faith come back to me? I don’t claim to know the answer. But what I want to talk about right now is trust. Faith for me was intimately involved with love for God and trust in Him, and that trust in Him was as transformative as the love. . . .

Before my consecration to Christ, I became familiar with a whole range of arguments against the Savior to whom I committed my life. In the end I didn’t find the skeptics particularly convincing, while at the same time the power of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John swept me off my feet. And above all, when I began to talk to Jesus Christ again it was with trust.

On the afternoon in 1998 when faith returned, I experienced a sense of the limitless power and majesty of God that left me convinced that He knew all the answers to the theological and sociological questions that had tormented me for years. I saw, in one enduring moment, that the God who could make the Double Helix and the snow flake, the God who could make the Black holes in space, and the lilies of the field, could do absolutely anything and must know everything — even why good people suffer, why genocide and war plague our planet, and why Christians have lost, in America and in other lands, so much credibility as people who know how to love. I felt a trust in this all-knowing God; I felt a sudden release of all my doubts. Indeed, my questions became petty in the face of the greatness I beheld. I felt a deep and irreversible assurance that God knew and understood every single moment of every life that had ever been lived, or would be lived on Earth. I saw the universe as an immense and intricate tapestry, and I perceived that the Maker of the tapestry saw interwoven in that tapestry all our experiences in a way that we could not hope, on this Earth, to understand.

This was not a joyful moment for me. It wasn’t an easy moment. It was an admission that I loved and believed in God, and that my old atheism was a façade. I knew it was going to be difficult to return to the Maker, to give over my life to Him, and become a member of a huge quarreling religion that had broken into many denominations and factions and cults worldwide. But I knew that the Lord was going to help me with this return to Him. I trusted that He would help me. And that trust is what under girds my faith to this day."

I am fascinated that Jesus is still winning over converts to Himself after two thousand years. He won me over as a young teen, and I today feel His grip more strongly than ever. I am a prisoner of love.

Irish Heartbeat: Van Morrison & The Chieftains

This CD was my "gateway drug" to Irish traditional music.

My friend Rick gave me a copy in 2003, but this album was recorded in 1988, a collaboration between Belfast boy Van Morrison and trad kings The Chieftains.

The songs are mostly traditional Irish (with the Scottish "Marie's Wedding" thrown in), tunes played heartily by the Irish masters, and lyrics growled affectionately by Morrison.

Van Morrison is acclaimed by many as a great singer and songwriter, and while this album may have been a digression for him, surely his rendition of  "Carrickfergus" must rank with the best of his efforts in any decade. (One of the great things about Amazon.com is that you can listen to samples by going to their product page for this album.)

For The Chieftains, this was the first of many collaborations with big-name musicians (Sting, the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Alison Krauss, Ricky Skaggs, the Corrs, Elvis Costello and many others). Some of their best collaborations are included on "The Wide World Over: A 40 Year Celebration" (with audio samples available at Amazon as well).

Growing up as a fan of white Gospel Music (the Blackwood Brothers, the Statesmen, the Speer Family), I graduated in 1972 to Contemporary Christian Music (the Imperials, Andrae Crouch & the Disciples, Love Song) and in 1987 to Praise & Worship (Vineyard Music, Integrity's Hosanna! Music). But this music opened the door for me to World Music in general and Celtic Music in particular.

I'm glad the door was opened!