"Jesus Loves Me, This I Know"

In about four weeks, my husband and I will become grandparents for the first time. Our son and daughter-in-law are the ones affording us the great honor. As I try to get myself ready for this momentous transition in life, my thoughts go back to the days of parenting that son, his twin sister, and his younger brother. I remember the book series we subscribed to that sent the classics of children’s literature our way – including Pigs in Hiding, The Carrot Seed, and Goodnight Moon. When I went to the Scholastic web site to see if I could subscribe to the same series for my grandchild, a new option should not have surprised me: ebooks.

            I also thought about the series of child development toys we subscribed to from Johnson & Johnson. One particularly well-used one was a yellow “dumbbell” with squeaks at each end and a bright, red tracking ball in the middle. The series offered similar toys sent once every couple of months. They were all equally bright, functional, and educational. Since all of my twentysomething children are independent and successful, I wondered if those toys had anything to do with it. Are these toys still available? Can I subscribe to the series for my grandchild? No – but I can buy used ones on ebay.

            Books and toys are important for shaping a child’s world, but so is music. The songs my children grew up hearing came from Sesame Street, including the classic “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” Raffi (“Three green and speckled frogs sat on a speckled log eating some most delicious bugs”), and Mr. Rogers. In my book, that man was a saint, along with being a Presbyterian minister. Who else but Mr. Rogers would think to write a song for children telling them “You Can Never Go Down the Drain”?

As I pondered my children’s complete musical repertoire, once again, the internet blessed my memory. A quick search reminded me of “Free to Be, You and Me” and some very timely lyrics: Parents are people; people with children. When parents were little they used to be kids, like all of you; but then they grew and now parents are grown-ups, grown-ups with children…

As I contemplate the changes my grown up kid about to become a parent will face, I wonder what kind of music will shape his child’s life? When I began to reflect last Sunday with the saints of Seneca Presbyterian Church on the power of music to shape faith, I was taken with the amazing individuality of musical options in our time. With Amazon Cloud Players, Pandora, and Sirius radio, we can easily listen to whatever we want to hear whenever we want to hear it. I wonder how this world will alter the power of music to shape a generation, because music does have the power to shape us. It teaches us what is important, where our passions should lie, what it means to be human, and for Christians, what we think it means to be children of God.

When we gather for worship this Sunday at SPC, we will consider how music teaches. How do the hymns and songs we choose to sing together shape our understanding of God, of Jesus, of the Holy Spirit, and what it means to be Christian disciples? If you are anywhere near-by, come join us! 

Glory to God

This Sunday at Seneca Presbyterian Church we will be celebrating worship. We will welcome David Gambrell, an Associate for Worship from the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA) - our "mother" denomination. David is coming to introduce a new hymnal that our denomination is publishing entitled Glory to God. In the weeks to come, we at SPC will be deciding if this hymnal can be a tool for deepening our experience of God in worship.

Our choir will be singing one of the selections from the new hymnal that may be new to us. It is "Here in This Place" by Marty Haugen, sometimes called "Gather Us In." I once had the privilege of meeting Marty. It was at a spirituality conference at Montreat - our denomination's conference center in western North Carolina. My ministerial duties at the time were focused on education. The conference was introducing Way to Live - a book about spiritual practices for teens. That feature was my motivation for attending the conference, but I came away with so much more.


Marty was the musician for the conference. Because our group was small - about thirty - we had a wonderful opportunity to get to know him and experience much of his music. He offered us a concert devoted to the hymns and songs he has composed across a lifetime, but it was actually more of a sing-a-long than concert. As he introduced his songs and then led us in the singing, I was drawn to the depth of his theology and to his melodies. But most of all, I was drawn to the person who spoke so eloquently of the place of music in worship. After the concert, I thanked him for reminding me that the music of worship is the sung prayers of the people. His reply was, "No, thank you."

Ask any theologian from any Christian tradition and they will define worship/liturgy as the "work of the people." When we gather to worship God, we see the congregation of God's people "at work." We engage in practices that have formed and nurtured faith for centuries. We welcome each other in God's name. We praise God. We pray to God. We confess our sins. We receive God's forgiveness offered to us in the name and by the power of Jesus Christ. We hear God's Word and then seek to understand and live it more deeply. We affirm what we believe. We pray for one another. We dedicate our lives to serve God as disciples of Jesus Christ. And we sing.

The role of the worship leaders - pastor, liturgist, choir - is to help the congregation do its work. Yet  too often they are the ones perceived as the workers - or even worse, the performers. That can be especially true with music. The worship leaders who are musicians - for us our organist and choir and band - do offer to us the gift of their talents. They work hard and prepare well in order to offer that gift. Listening to them with the heart of faith deepens our faith. I once had a seminary professor who said frequently that just listening to St. Matthew's Passion was an altar call for him. So the music of worship is often the sung prayers of the choir and the organ -  and the guitarist and the drummer and the keyboardist. But if that is how we perceive the primary role of music in worship, we shortchange ourselves.

For in the end, it is what we do that draws us most deeply to God. And that includes singing, on pitch or not.

I'm looking forward to learning more about our denomination's new hymnal. I am anxious to see how Glory to God can serve us by offering the workers of worship - the congregation - greater opportunity to deepen our faith. Because when we sing, we praise God; we confess our sins; we affirm what we believe; we seek to understand and live the faith we profess. We do all that in concert - in melody - with all those who worship with us. And that, my friends, is a gift to God.