The Lost Songs of the Church

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 137 — the exiles by the rivers of Babylon, hanging up their harps because they cannot sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land. It is one of the most uncomfortable psalms in the Bible. It ends with a curse on Babylon. The Holy Spirit put it in our hymnal anyway.

Read Psalm 42 — "As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God... My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, 'Where is your God?'" Read Psalm 80 — Israel's national lament: "Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved." Read 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."

Reflection

For most of church history, Christians sang their grief.

Open the Genevan Psalter of 1562 and you will find every one of the 150 psalms set to music — including Psalm 88, including Psalm 137, including the imprecations and the dark nights. John Calvin's Geneva sang these in worship, not as a niche project but as the spine of public devotion. Open Isaac Watts and you will find hymns built on lament psalms — "Alas, and Did My Saviour Bleed?" with its astonished sorrow at the cross, "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" emerging out of Psalm 90's meditation on death. Open Charles Wesley and you will find tens of thousands of lines that hold sin, doubt, suffering, and hope together. Bach wrote whole cantatas — "Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis" ("I had much grief") — out of this stream. The funeral hymns alone in any nineteenth-century hymnal would fill an entire modern worship leader's repertoire several times over.

Then look at the average evangelical worship set this Sunday. Five songs, often in major keys, almost always landing on victory. Some of them are wonderful. Many of them are theologically true. None of them give a grieving believer any place to stand. We have, almost without noticing, edited a third of the Bible's prayer book out of our singing.

N. T. Wright has spent much of his later career trying to sound this alarm. He calls the Psalter "the prayer book Jesus used" and warns that we are in danger of forgetting that fact. The Psalms were the hymnal of the synagogue. They were the hymnal of the early church. Through nineteen centuries — through plagues and persecutions and wars and famines — Christians sang the whole Psalter together, the dark psalms and the bright psalms and everything in between, because the church understood that the people of God need the whole Psalter to be the people of God. The fact that we, in our affluence and entertainment, have decided we no longer need most of it is not a sign of progress. It is a sign of how far our worship has drifted from biblical worship.

The cost of this is not theoretical.

When the only songs a church sings are songs of triumph, the church teaches — without saying it directly — that triumph is the normal Christian experience and grief is a problem to be cured. So when grief comes (and grief comes), the believer in the pew has two options: pretend, or leave. Many do both. They pretend for years and then quietly leave. The church congratulates itself on its joyful music while the broken slip out the back, taking with them the suspicion that the gospel has nothing to say to where they actually are. It does have something to say. It has Psalms 13, 22, 42, 88, 137, and a hundred more. The church has just stopped singing them.

Augustine, who wept openly through much of his Confessions, said in one of his sermons that "tears of penitents are the wine of angels." He meant that the grief of God's people is not embarrassing to heaven. It is precious there. The angels store it like wine. The God who made the human face made it with tear ducts on purpose. Christianity does not deny grief; it sanctifies it. It baptizes it into prayer. That is what the lament psalms are doing.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing his small book on the Psalms from prison, said the Psalter is given to us so that we might "learn to pray them in the name of Jesus Christ." Bonhoeffer prayed the Psalms — including the lament psalms — every day in his cell. He had every reason to need them. The man who would be hanged by the Nazis in a few months understood something most of us have forgotten: in the night, you do not sing what you have not learned to sing. If your church has only ever taught you to sing in the daylight, you will be musically illiterate when the dark comes.

The historical record is clear. Calvin's church sang Psalm 88. Watts wrote settings of penitential psalms. Wesley's hymns range across the entire emotional terrain of the Christian life. Bach turned the Passion narratives into music that does not flinch. The medieval church sang the Dies Irae. The African American spiritual tradition — which has sustained more grief in song than any tradition in modern Christian history — kept lament alive in American worship through the worst of suffering. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. The church that sings only happy songs is the church that has lost the songs the slaves and the saints and the prisoners actually needed.

This is not a call to make worship grim. It is a call to make worship whole. The Psalter has psalms of celebration too — Psalm 100, Psalm 145, Psalm 150. The point is the proportion. The Holy Spirit gave us a hymnal that was roughly one-third lament. A worship culture that is one-tenth-of-one-percent lament is not closer to the New Testament; it is further from it. We are singing a Psalter the apostles would not recognize.

Recovery starts small. Sing one minor-key song this Sunday. Read a lament psalm aloud in the gathering. Pray Psalm 80 — "Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved" — over your city. Teach the congregation that mourning is one of the things Christians do, and the Bible has given us songs for it, and we are going to learn them again. The church has nineteen centuries of music waiting. It is not lost. It is just unsung.

When grief comes — and grief comes — the people in your pew will need to know that their church has language for it. The Holy Spirit has given that language. The only question is whether the church will pick it back up.

Going Deeper

Find one lament hymn this week — "Abide with Me," "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded," "When Peace Like a River" (which was written by a man who had just lost four daughters at sea), or a setting of a lament psalm — and learn it by heart. Sing it once a day for a week. You are restoring something the church desperately needs and has nearly forgotten how to want.