Music and Worship

Music has the power to connect us with our deep feelings of wonder, thanksgiving, and sadness, and sacred music helps us to experience how God holds us together from the deepest sorrow to the highest joy. Last week, Betsy and I attended the annual Lecture on Religion at Hiram College to hear Dr. Don Saliers. Dr. Saliers has spent a career studying worship and theology, and has worked with hymnals and sacred music in many settings. He recently co-wrote a book with his daughter Emily, who is one of the Indigo Girls, a popular duo of singer-songwriters. The book is about the importance of music in our lives. He told us about a group of women, elders in a church he visited, who love the old favorite hymns such as "Blessed Assurance" and "How Great Thou Art" because when they sing those words they can still hear their parents and grandparents voices. He told us about a family who took their father to church when he was near the end of his life, who had lost most of his awareness about his surroundings. He had trouble concentrating on the service until it was time to sing the doxology. When the organ began he stood up and sang every single word: "praise God from whom all blessings flow."

Music touches us somewhere deep, near our inmost being. And that is where we find God, at the center of ourselves, holding us together. The book of psalms is the Hebrew songbook that Jesus prayed. The psalms reflect the entire range of human experience. When we feel on top of the world, we can hear the words of Psalm 96: "Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice!" When we walk through the valley of the shadow, we are touched by the words of Psalm 22, the same words that Jesus spoke from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Even when we feel that God has gone away, we have a song to sing to God in our distress. These psalms remind us that there is nothing we experience that is apart from God. God meets us in the joy and the sadness, and our psalms, our hymns, and the songs we sing all remind us that God is with us.

The psalms invite us to "Sing to the Lord a new song." The song we sing is the life we live.