I did not know the hymns that meant something to this older congregation: Trust and Obey, Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling, Standing on the Promises, I Need Thee Every Hour.
The people were confounded. I was asked, "If you don't know these hymns what will you think of on your deathbed to bring you comfort!" Other hymns, I responded.
As my husband was moved from church to church there was an adjustment to each congregation's most beloved hymns and the challenge of teaching hymns from the new hymnal.
Hymn singing is a communal act that reinforces a congregation's identity and faith commitment. It is often the highlight of worship for most in the pews. The hymns comfort and they confirm and they spur to be better.
As choral singer since childhood, I have long understood that to sing is to be part of a community, working together toward a common goal. Singing in worship is an act of praise, a confirmation of faith, and can spur a recommitment of intent.
Walter Brueggemann's A Glad Obedience examines the tradition of song in worship, beginning with the Psalms and then considering classic and contemporary hymns including “Blest Be the Ties That Binds,” "Holy Holy Holy,"“God's Eye Is on the Sparrow,” "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," "O For a Closer Walk With God," “Once to Every Man and Nation,” “Someone Asked the Question,” and “We Are Marching in the Light of God.”
In Part I, he asks, Why do we sing this psalm? Beginning with Psalm 104, a creation hymn, he breaks down its parts to explain what it meant to its original singers. For instance, "the song is sung in an arid climate" and uses water imagery (You make springs gush forth in the valleys) as affirmation that all life, human and plant and animal, "stand together before the life-giving gifts of God."
As Brueggemann walks us through the Psalms he leads readers into a deeper understanding of the text and faith.
"We sing our penultimacy as an act of resistance and as a proposal of alternative. The resistance performed by this singing is against the reduction of creation to a series of commodity transactions because it is all gift...It is the affirmation that we live in a generous context of abundance in which there is enough for all of God's creatures." from A Glad Obedience by Walter Brueggemann
Part Two, What We Sing, Brueggemann considers traditional and contemporary hymns. He "relishes the words, phrases, and images that lie deep in our faith tradition" to show how attentiveness to the hymn lyrics challenge the "dominant worldly ideology" and can lead to"joyous risk-taking obedience."
One of my favorite hymns, God of Grace and God of Glory by Harry Emerson Fosdick, is included. "Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days," "Cure thy children's warring madness, bend our pride to thy control," "Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore," are lines that seem to be always relevant.
Brueggemann first presents the hymn's historical context, written in 1930, during the depression and in a time when the world "struggled with systemic disarmament." He considers the theological bent of Fosdick's Social Gospel and how the hymn's theology is related to that of his contemporaries Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr (author of the well-known Serenity Prayer). Then he breaks the hymn down with a commentary.
A neglected hymn which Brueggemann admires is based on James Russell Lowell's 1845 poem "Once to Every Man and Nation." Lowell wrote the words as a protest against President Polk's expansionist war with Mexico as a way to add slave states to shift the balance of power.
Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
'Twixt that darkness and that light.
from Once to Every Man and Nation
Brueggemann relates the hymn's time and purpose to the current president's immigration policy. Brueggemann writes, "...when we sing this hymn...we also sing concerning our own moral crisis in which the quality and future of our common humanity is at stake."
Brueggemann prods us to pay attention to what we sing, to let the words deepen our faith and make manifest in our actions the values we proclaim to hold.
The Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann is the author of over 100 books. Read a sample of this book at
https://www.wjkbooks.com/Products/0664264646/a-glad-obedience.aspx
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
A Glad Obedience
Why and What We Sing
by Walter Brueggemann
Westminster John Knox Press
Pub Date: 15 Jan 2019
ISBN: 9780664264642
PRICE: $18.00 (USD)
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