The Lost Songs of the Church

Today's Scripture

Psalm 137:1-4 — "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?"

Psalm 42:1-3 — "As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, 'Where is your God?'"

Colossians 3:16 — "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God."

The Big Idea

For most of church history, Christians sang their grief. Sad songs were not a niche genre; they were a third of the hymnal, because they are a third of the Psalter. Today we ask an uncomfortable question: what happens to God's people when the only songs left on the playlist are happy ones?

Reflection

Harps in the willow trees

Picture the scene in Psalm 137. Babylon's army has burned Jerusalem and marched its people seven hundred miles from home. An exile is someone forced to live far from the place they belong. Now their captors want entertainment: Sing us one of the songs of Zion! Play us something happy from the old country.

And the musicians refuse. They hang their harps in the willow branches by the river and sit down in the dirt and cry. "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" (Psalm 137:4).

But notice what the question became. It became a song. Israel took the very moment when singing felt impossible and set it to music, so that every later generation in its own exile could sing about not being able to sing. The psalm even keeps its rawest edge — it ends in a cry for justice against Babylon so fierce it makes us flinch. God kept the whole thing in the hymnal. He would rather have his people sing honestly through tears than hum politely through clenched teeth.

Martin Luther — the German reformer who put songbooks back into ordinary people's hands — explained why these dark psalms matter so much:

"Where do you find deeper, more sorrowful, more pitiful words of sadness than in the psalms of lamentation? There again you look into the hearts of all the saints, as into death, yes, as into hell itself." — Martin Luther, Preface to the Psalter

Into the hearts of all the saints. When you sing a lament, you are not being a bad Christian. You are standing in the longest line in church history. N.T. Wright says the Psalms are not optional extras for the church:

"The Psalms represent the Bible's own spiritual root system for the great tree we call Christianity." — N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms

A tree cut off from its roots can look green for a while. Then a dry season comes.

Talking back to your own soul

Psalm 42 shows you what a sung lament actually does inside a person. The writer is far from the temple, mocked all day with "Where is your God?", and his tears have become his food (Psalm 42:3). Then he does something remarkable. He turns and addresses his own soul: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him" (Psalm 42:5).

He stops listening to his sadness and starts talking to it. Read the verse again and you can see both motions in one breath: first the honest question to his own heart — why are you cast down? — and then the command he gives it — hope in God. He does not skip the question to get to the command. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a doctor who became one of the great preachers of the twentieth century, built a whole book on this verse:

"Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?" — Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure

That is what a lament song trains you to do. The melody carries you through the complaint and then puts true words in your mouth to say back to your own heart. You cannot do that with a song you have never learned. And here is the thing our suspicion of "emotional" worship gets exactly backwards: the Bible wants your feelings in the room, not parked at the door. Jonathan Edwards, the theologian of the Great Awakening, insisted on it:

"True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections." — Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections

Affections is an old word for the deep loves and sorrows that move us. A faith with no tears in it is not more mature, Edwards would say. It is less alive.

What happened to the church's playlist

For nineteen centuries the church kept the whole Psalter in its mouth. John Calvin's Geneva sang all 150 psalms to music — Psalm 88 included. Augustine, remembering the days right after his conversion, described what the church's singing did to him:

"How did I weep, in thy hymns and canticles, touched to the quick by the voices of thy sweet-attuned Church! The voices flowed into mine ears, and the truth distilled into my heart, whence the affections of my devotion overflowed, and tears ran down, and happy was I therein." — Augustine, Confessions, Book IX

Weeping in church — and calling it happiness. Isaac Watts turned Psalm 90, a meditation on death, into one of the most loved hymns in the English language:

"O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home." — Isaac Watts, 'O God, Our Help in Ages Past'

And in 1873 a Chicago businessman named Horatio Spafford, days after his four daughters drowned in a shipwreck, sailed over the place where they died and wrote this:

"When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll; whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, 'It is well, it is well with my soul.'" — Horatio Spafford, 'It Is Well with My Soul'

That is not a happy song. It is something better: a true one, written in the minor key of real loss, still sung by grieving people 150 years later. The enslaved believers of the American South kept the same tradition alive — Sometimes I feel like a motherless child — singing sorrow to God because sorrow was what they had.

Now count the laments in last Sunday's set list at the average church. Often the number is zero. Remember the proportion: God's own hymnal is roughly one-third lament. A worship diet that is one hundred percent celebration is not more spiritual than the Bible's. It is just thinner — and the people it starves first are the ones already hurting.

Imagine a man whose wife's funeral was on Thursday walking in that Sunday. Every screen is bright; every chorus is victorious. None of it is false — but none of it gives him anywhere to stand. He will learn, without anyone saying it, that his grief is not welcome in the room. That may be the loneliest seat in the city.

This is not what the New Testament pictures. Colossians 3:16 tells the church to teach and admonish one another "singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" — psalms first, the whole Psalter, dark ones included. Ephesians 5:19 repeats the instruction almost word for word: "addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs." Our songs are not just for God; they are how we speak truth to each other. A church that never sings sorrow is silently telling its sufferers a falsehood: that they are alone. Romans 12:15 gives the correction in seven words: "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep." Both halves are commands. Most of our music obeys only the first.

The Man who sang on the way to the cross

If you want one image to carry out of today, take this one. Matthew 26:30 — "And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives."

It is the night of the Last Supper. Jesus knows Judas has already gone to betray him. He knows Gethsemane and the cross are hours away. And what does he do with his disciples, last of all, before walking into the dark? He sings. Jewish custom tells us it would have been from the Psalms — the very prayer book whose laments he would be quoting by morning, and the same psalms that promise, "Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved!" (Psalm 80:3).

The gospel is not that Jesus hands us a songbook and wishes us luck with the sad parts. The gospel is that he sang the songbook himself — sang on the way to the place where every lament in it would land on his own shoulders. He drank the sorrow the songs describe so that the songs' endings would come true for us. Because the Man of Sorrows sang in the dark, our singing in the dark is never solo. He has perfect pitch in the minor key, and he is not embarrassed to stand next to us in it.

So the goal is not gloomier worship. The Psalter is full of trumpets and dancing too, and we should sing every bit of that. The goal is whole worship — a church whose music has room for the mother with the empty chair at her table, because its Savior had room for her first. A congregation that can weep together on the hard Sundays will find its celebration rings truer on the bright ones. Songs that have been through the dark carry more weight in the light.

Going Deeper

Learn one lament song by heart this week — "It Is Well with My Soul," "Abide with Me," "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded," or a sung setting of Psalm 42. Sing or read it once a day for seven days, even on the days you feel fine. You are not performing sadness. You are stocking a pantry before the winter — putting words on the shelf that some future midnight will desperately need.