Texts: Mark 10:13-16; Psalm 96:1-6; I Corinthians 14:13-15
I hope that these three Sundays that we are spending on hymns and “hymnody”—that is the collection of hymns or songs of a time, place, and/or church—are as beneficial to you as they have been fun for me. I have been singing hymns in church since I was a small child, and they have conveyed more of faith to me than anything written book of doctrine or sermon I ever heard. I find that it helps me to know something of their background and the context in which they were written and composed, much like we try to understand Scripture from the point of view of those who wrote it, and those who would read it, the history of the times, the various religious issues of the day, and so forth.
My own awareness that hymns matter began when I was in about the 3rd of 4th grade and in Sunday School, some ill-advised new teacher leading our morning worship before class, decided that we should sing: Love lifted me, with an opening verse that goes:
I was sinking deep in sin
Far from the peaceful shore
Very deeply stained within
Sinking to rise no more.
In the midst of that first line, we heard the sound of running feet in the hallway as Mr. Farish, the minister at Woodland whose ministry began in my mother’s adolescence and continued until my 13th year, and of whom we children were a bit fearful, but not as much as the adult members of the congregation, threw open the Sunday School room door and said sternly: Stop singing that song right now! These children are NOT sinking deep in sin, and they are NOT very deeply stained, and I will NOT have them thinking that they are. NEVER sing that wretched song again in this Sunday School.” We didn’t and it won’t be sung here, either.
Hymns, and other language we use in worship, does matter greatly. We absorb these songs used in liturgy, and the repetitive words of liturgy in ways differently from our usual methods of processing information. I like to think it is a kind of osmosis, where the words and tunes seep into our very bones. Indeed, as I have noted, when those with dementia have forgotten everything else, they often will remember the 23rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer, and Jesus Loves Me.
Paul, writing to the Corinthians, who were having arguments over the value and worth of various “gifts of the spirit”, and specifically the matter of “speaking on tongues”—or ecstatic speech known as glossolalia, says that singing with spirit—enthusiasm, gusto, enjoyment is important, but that we must not forget to use our minds, our intelligence in what we pray and what we sing.
If Love Lifted Me was a very bad hymn for children to sing (and I would argue that the theology of it is terrible for people of any age and definitely unsuitable for the times in which we now live), what standards should apply to determine if a hymn is good or bad?
I don’t want to talk long, so that we can sing some of the best hymns of different genres or types of hymns in a moment. Here are 4 standards by which to judge the quality of a hymn:
- Are its words theologically sound? More explicitly: does it reflect what we actually say that we affirm as Christians? Are those words applicable to our lives and experiences, over time and history? Do they have “staying power”? Language changes over time. Theology has changed. The easiest examples can be found in the use of language about war, blood, and sin. The Reformation was a time of religious wars. The 19th century, which saw the composition of many of our popular gospel songs, was a bloody era on these shores, with the Mexican War, and then the Civil War on these shores. There was a lot of blood shed. After the war, when probably many men were trying to numb themselves to the horror of war with alcohol, Carrie Nation and her tribe launched the campaign for prohibition, and there was a lot of feeling of guilt, of sorrow, of lost opportunities, of sinfulness, and the need for redemption. More about this when we look at Gospel songs on the last Sunday in August.
After World War II, the world was so weary of war that songs that celebrated God as the victorious King just felt oppressive, and so churches stopped singing: God of our Fathers; God the Omnipotent; Lead On, O King Eternal, Onward Christian Soldiers (left out of most denomination’s newer hymnbooks) and other such hymns that seem to celebrate a dominating, triumphant God. We have replaced them with hymns about peace, and concern for the poor, or for the environment.
And one more point on this issue of theological soundness: how we talk about salvation, and how that happens, has changed radically. For several generations (from the Civil War until about WWII), the focus was that Jesus died for our sins. Now the focus is that salvation is a process, a journey, a way of living that corresponds to what we have learned about holiness from Jesus, so that Jesus is the model for our life, not the sacrificial victim of all our evil.
Interestingly, there was a long period when only hymns that were actual Scripture set to music could be sung. John Calvin would only allow the book of Psalms, the Psalter, to be used in Geneva, and in the Church of Scotland, they could not sing anything but the Psalms until the first decade of the 20th century.
It was Isaac Watts, a non-conformist which means that instead of being a member of the Church of England, he was a puritan or Congregationalist, who began to introduce scripturally paraphrased poems into hymns. He is known as the father of English hymnody and wrote words for over 750 hymns, including O God, Our Help in Ages Past.
2. Second, to be a good hymn a hymn must be devotional, and help us be more open to the numinous—a big word that means “transcendent mystery”, and thus led to a deep experience of awe, wonder, and worship. A good hymn must touch our hearts and help our minds reach out toward that transcendent holiness that we sometimes catch glimmers of—in nature, in beauty, in music, in words. A melody can do this as much as the poem that provides the words for the hymn.
It must also be liturgically appropriate. We open worship with songs of praise. Other hymns should prepare us for prayer, or reflection on Scripture, or to receive the Lord’s Supper. We wouldn’t sing a Christmas carol in Holy Week, and we shouldn’t sing a song about Jesus’ death and suffering, on Easter Sunday
3. Hymns should be universal: that is they should include all kinds of people, living in many different cultures. Thus, our language has changed over the past 50 years in particular to be more inclusive of men and women, children, people of color. We have tried to avoid hymns with language that make people feel less than whole or less than worthy of God’s love. Hymns should offer hope, not condemnation or exclusion.
4. Fourth, to be a good hymn, the hymn must be musically appropriate. You don’t want to sing a song of praise to a tune that is in a melancholy or minor mode. The music should invite a sense of majesty and awe, or invite introspection by being ethereal, for example.
And in this vein, the hymn should be “singable” by the majority of the congregation. Most untrained singers have a vocal range of just one octave (12 half steps). Most untrained singers cannot make a leap of a whole octave, and find it difficult to jump more than four notes in a scale. A song that goes too high, or too low—rarely the problem—becomes unsingable, and winds up sounding like screeching. So altho’ it is beloved by some amongst us, an example of a song that fails at least on the “singability test”, and to my mind also on the theology test (but more about that in August) is “His Eye Is On the Sparrow” because it goes up to a F, an octave and a half above middle C. As people have gotten taller over the past centuries, our vocal chords have changed and our voices are MUCH lower than the average voice a century ago when songs like this were written.
Lowell Mason, 1792-1872, the so-called Father of American Hymn Singing who composed over 1600 tunes, including Mary Had a Little Lamb and Joy to the World, brought European classical styles to American hymn singing. Mason was basically responsible for introducing singing by the congregation—not a paid choir or quartet of solo voices—with the accompaniment of an organ to American churches. (He was also responsible for introducing music to American public schools.) His family made organs, and eventually his sons started the factory in Boston that made the fine Mason and Hamlin pianos.
So four tests to decide if a hymn is a good hymn or not:
- Theological soundness.
- Aids in personal and corporate devotion and worship in appropriate ways, liturgically, theologically, and in terms of musical form.
- Universal in appeal, that is it speaks to many diverse people in diverse life situations.
- Musically appropriate; singable; and without odd rhythms and harmonic progressions that are difficult or harsh to the ear and next to impossible for untrained voices to sing. Let’s sing a few of what can be deemed as some of the very best hymns from various types of hymns:
We’ve already sung two chorales (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God and O Sacred Head Now Wounded), and two segments from the Psalter (Psalm 143 for the response to the prayer; and Old Hundredth from the Geneva Psalter for the Doxology).
Let’s try a plainsong that we often sing on Christmas Eve: Of the Father’s Love Begotten, No. 124. The words are from the 4th century Liturgy of St. James; with this particular musical setting coming from a 17th century French Carol.
The next hymn: We Sing Your Mighty Power, O God, No. 64, is an Isaac Watts hymn. This hymn is another sample of a German chorale.
It was hard to choose just one Christmas Carol. We might have sung “Joy to the World” by Lowell Mason, but I finally settled on Charles Wesley’s Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, No. 150. by the standards I’ve outlined: It is set to triumphant music by that great Jewish composer of Christian music, Felix Mendelssohn. Charles Wesley was the younger brother of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, altho’ Charles never left the Church of England. The Wesley’s and the early American evangelist George Whitefield in the late 1700s and early 1800s, did more for American hymn singing than anyone until the time of Lowell Mason.
African-American Spirituals, with their deep longing, express for many of us our yearning hopes, and they move us emotionally and spiritually. Again, I had a hard time choosing just one, and finally selected Steal Away, No. 644, for its multiple levels of meaning for the slaves who sang it first.
Finally, one more genre, a more modern one, but probably the best of its type: a praise song, that is sung repeatedly, until it just becomes almost hypnotic in its capacity to move you from distractedness to a kind of centeredness on the holy. Ubi Caritas No. 523 , as it is known by its Latin title, was written for the monastic community at Taize, France, which draws thousands of young people from all over the world every summer, for a time of work and living together and worship throughout the day. A song like this would be sung during a Taize service maybe 20 times.
