Singing Drivel

There are seven hundred twenty numbered hymns in The Hymnal 1982, though in practice the number is somewhat lower, due to multiple tunes and certain songs unsuited to ordinary hymn singing (e.g. the rounds). So let's say that the actual number is more like the six hundred that the 1940 hymnal contained. In actual practice no parish uses them all: some are just duds, and the office hymns simply see little use as people don't do those services much, and there are all the unsingable new tunes. But a lot of them simply do not reflect the taste of whoever sets up the liturgy. And the warhorses that people want to hear over and over leave less room for others. Our organist comes from outside the Anglican tradition, and she frequently asks me whether the congregation knows a certain hymn. I've at least looked at every single one, if not sung them all. (You can hear one of a few marathon trips through the lot here.) THe truth is that our parish, for several reasons, works with a relatively small subset of the entirety: if we use as many as half the total in a three year lectionary cycle, I'd be quite surprised. I suspect the number is closer to a third, probably less. Pne opf those reasons is that we also have a band, so that half the hymn slots are taken up by their songs.

But on top of this the new rector likes to put in music from the various supplements. We have enough Wonder Love and Praise copies to put them in the pews, though we haven't bothered to in years. Mostly what we sing from there are "contemporary" RC music warhorses, and it's always the same few. We also have Lift Every Voice and Sing for music from the black church tradition. Again we don't range widely through it.

But I haven't kept up with the progression of supplements, and lately we've been getting ones with newly written material. Occasionally there is a winner among these: "Mary Heard the Angel's Message" is a good text with a good melody. More typically the music is marginally tolerable, but the text is, well, bad.

Especially they tend towards the precious. Writing your own version of the Benedicite is always a risky business, especially when St. Francis almost certainly did a better job (and got it set twice n the hymnal at that: "All Creatures of Our God and King", which everyone sings, and "Most High Omnipotent Good Lord", which nobody does). You are already at peril of getting the treatment C. F. Alexander got at the hands of Monty Python:

All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot.

And that leads to one of the hymnal duds: "Earth and All Stars", which most likely got in on the strength of a good tune and a reasonably good first verse. After that, it goes steeply downhill, what with the "loud humming cellos" and "loud boiling test tubes", and again there's that problem that parody is all too easy:

Vermin and pests,
Loud gnawing termites,
Sing to the Lord a new song;
Insects and bugs,
Loud stinging hornets,
Sing to the Lord a new song.

(I have more where that came from.) This peril has not however dissuaded others from trying thigs along the same line. So this past Sunday we got "God of the Sparrow" by Jaroslav Vadja, who as it happens has an entry in the hymnal: "Now the Silence, Now the Peace"; it makes for a nice solo during communion but which s not terribly practical for congregational singing. This "new" hymn (it actually dates from the late 1980s and appears in the 1989 UMC hymnal) at least has verses and a singable if not great tune, has the same kind of structure as "Earth and All Stars": each verse is the same except with different nouns filled in the blanks. And I'm sorry, Mr. Vadja, but on top of the problem of easy parody, the langauge is stilted and contrived. And yes, the parody. If "how does the creature say awe" brings to my not-inclined-to-reverence mind the point in the first George of the Jungle movie where the narrator is arguing with the characters about the "aaaw" they are experiencing seeing Ape Mountain for the first time, the urge to stick in random words is nearly irresistable. As it is, I kept my mouth shut and tried to think of other things.

Look, I know about writing hymns: it isn't easy, especially when you're trying to say something "new". I've tended to write my own texts, if only to escape copyright issues, but it is also difficult to find good material because the field is so heavily plowed and because so much of it is, well, sentimental tripe. There's a reason why most of the 400s from the 1940 hymnal didn't make the cut for 1982: they represent a Victorian piety and sentimentality which just didn't survive two world wars and then the sixties, at least not in my church.Mostly mine are assembled from BCP and scriptural material, which also helps me avoid theological novelty. I did set one of the Davids Adams's texts, but these are patterned after old Celtic forms (and as it happens, the one I chose also ended up in the New Oxford Easy Anthem Book), but by and large I find way too much recent material to be contrived and precious. And you always the risk of writing bad theology like "Mary Did You Know" (answer: YES! SHE DID!).

And as it stands, everyone knows the hymnal revision process is not going to kick into gear any time soon; but at the same tine, there is the same dissatisfaction with it that one sees with the BCP rites: a loss of nerve in the face of "progressive" social sentiment. Which is not totally bad: I'm plenty happy to sing a hymn written from the Virgin's perspective, if it be well-written and the theology be sound. But at the same time, they could crack the hymnal itself and try something "new" there.

It's "No Person's Liturgy Is Safe" Time Again

I'm going to start by saying that I have little interest in opining on the various calendar additions, subtactions, divisions and multiplications. It was one thing back in the day when there was a proposal to include a bunch of non-Christians, but thankfully that urge seems to have passed, and the rest is extreme inside baseball in a church where for the past few years my options for attending an Ascension Day eucharist have been severely limited. If you care to consider them, Scott Gunn goes though the lot, but I have other things to deal with.

And one of those things, I'm afraid, is the ongoing drive towards bowdlerization in the name of inclusion. Let me start with the depressing observation that it doesn't work anyway. And even if it did, the current reductionism of people to identities is (a) not loving, and (b) not coherent and likely to change considerably over the decades.

Let me start with gender/sex/sexuality. Here I am met with the stark contradiction that it is supposed to not matter, and that it is all-important. No amount of earnest 'splaining is getting me past that, and I say that as part of a household in which our adherence to Traditional Gender Roles is laughably poor. But we still can't get free of the urge to edit the Father out of the trinity, and this urge is wedded to some of the worst gender stereotyping around. All of this was evident poorly thought-through neutered versions of the Rite II liturgies, which by the way we have a resolution to apply this to Prayer C this time. It still stinks of "Moms are loving and nurturing and dads are cruel disciplinarians" thinking, but it's going to pass and it will give me one more thing I will have to check when I go church-visiting, because I do care about the theology being put in my mouth.

And now it has been decided that we have to fret about ableist language. Now we are getting into matters where I have skin in the game: over the last year I have had to deal with a knee injury which pevents me from walking normally, and I have had terrible nearsightedness since I was in kindergarten. If the devil showed up today with promises to fix both, I would at least have to read the terms and conditions. I'm sorry, but this sound as though it comes from people who have never read the gospels, as there are just too, too many episodes of Jesus healing for anyone to accept being blind, being crippled, having to live with birth defects and with injuries as identities. And to be blunt, the resolution reads as having been written by someone who never had to really suffer these handicaps. I do not authorize them to take offense on my behalf, and that is what they are daring to do.

The bigger issue, howeve, comes with the move to tamper with the Good Friday passion text. I will be blunt: we have no business making up our own version of the gospel passage which is not what the Greek actually says. In my parish, I am literally the person who reads this in our parish, year after year, and I say the whole exercise baldly ignores how our liturgical practices determinedly cast us as the Jews. Year after year we sing,

Who was the guilty? Who was it denied thee? Alas my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.

And must I point out that the really "problematic" passage isn't in this gospel? It's in Matthew: "His blood be on us and on our children!" And yet one can readily explain the irony of the passage, in that Jesus' blood is upon them and us and every person who has lived or will ever live. Have we so little faith in our preaching? It's the same issue that shows up with EoW's bad institution narrative: we can't say the wods of scripture, so we rewite it to make it more palatable to us. For of course, this would/will not move the world one iota away from antisemitism. No does any Jew I know actually care, as long as we personally do not burn their homes and drive them away.

So once again, the effect is to exclude those who aren't signed on to this version of an ineffectual gesture at a problem over which we don't have much influence. Only this is far worse than passing resolutions about politics, because this hits people in the place where they do care about their church. Look, we don't cae about actual inclusion; all we care about is mouthing the right words about inclusion so our secular peers don't take offense. I can go down the road to Our Savior Hillandale (Maryland) and step into a parish which is actually inclusive, being a motley agglomeration of African and othe immigrants who do a very formal, serious, by-the-book liturgy. My only problem with inclusion there is that they want me to stay for their lavish, delicious potluck lunch, which I tend not to have time for.

Meanwhile, we have a resolution which makes the whole revision process even more vague. Yes, I agree: we do need to do a revision. But not this way. The very avoidance of revision suggests quite stongly that most people don't want it, and I personally don't want it not so much because I think the present book is ideal, but because, as I've said for decades now, the main force fo change is obtaining the approval of a secular subcultue which actually doesn't care.

Why General Convention is So Wearying If You Pay Attention

It shouldn't be hard to come up with an answer to the question of "what is the #1 issue facing The Episcopal Church?" It's the numbers. I haven't dealt with the stats since COVID upended them, but if we're doing better than the average 3% decline per year of the past, I would be quite surprised. In almost every diocese the decline and closure of parishes is ongoing and is (or ought to be) a major concern; in the more rural dioceses it's more like an existential threat.

Therefore you should not be surprised to learn that very little of business slated for the upcoming General Convention addresses this issue. Indeed, as you can also guess, most of it has to do with the pet issues of the American progressive upper middle class. I am not going to go over every proposed resolution as Scott Gunn is doing, if only because I do not have the time nor the stomach to read through fourteen resolutions on the Palestine/Israel conflict. I'm going to have to deal with things in broader terms.

Those Middle Eastern political positions are a good place to start, though, for all of the usual reasons. First, hopefully nobody who wasn't at GC will care how they play out. It's hard to imagine anyone outside the church will care except for right wing loudmouths who want to tar us as hopeless leftists. Nobody, anywhere, is going to say, "well, now that TEC has spoken, I must reconsider my views." We have no moral authority left. And I do not think we can get it back by taking sides in what is a very old, fraught, and complex struggle, especially considering that, if we aren't as immediately culpable as a body as we are with American slavery, we are historically hardly free from the taint of antisemitism.

But beyond that, I don't agreewith the answers given in these resolutions. It would be for the good of everyone if Netanahu were out of power as quickly as legally possible, but it seems to me that a realistic resolution has to accept that Israelis face an existential threat. I am quite repulsed by various progressive voices playing down the savagery of the attack that set the whole thing off. And so, OK, maybe they will be rejected on that basis; but the large and constantly presenting issue here is that the content of these resolutions comes from outside the church. We put a little TEC color on the language, but the fact is that these are the views of one subculture, and they are being put in the church's mouth.

This comes up all over the place. Just the fact of which committees exist is telling. For example, we have a Environmental stewardship and care of creation, which is OK except that there are four resolutions toward carbon neutrality. On one level I have no issue with that, and as I've said many times, if we're taking this seriously we have to go beyond that and re-bind the carbon that's already up there. The issue again is that we have no authority other than to place demands upon ourselves; not only that, but it's hard to imagine that a church convention brings sufficient technical expertise to the issue to be credible. And looking over our shoulders at all those rural parishes that have to worry more about having a roof at all than caring whether it gets solar panels placed on it, again, this is the project of a certain upper class group, particularly those who can set aside the issue that making all those solar panels is sure to involve a great deal of environmentally destructive mining in third world countries whose people have no power to complain.

We also have committees on Social justice and United States policy, Stewardship and socially responsible investing, Safety, wellness and mental health, Accessibility and inclusion.... And this is not to say that none of these should be concerns brought before the convention, but that the very names of the committees bespeak a certain mindset. And indeed, looking inside, we find, besides the usual self-affirming "commend" resolutions that neither I nor Gunn has much use for, we find for instance a resolution to urge those in prison ministries to urge their fellows from other churches to hold the same views on various sexuality etc. topics if they are to work together. Personally I suspect this is completely divorced from the realities of such ministries, not the least of which is that those fellows are likely to be Roman Catholics or Baptists whose church policies are less enlightened than ours. And I cannot imagine any chaplain worth his or her salt paying the least attention to this directive. But it makes people of a certain subculture feel good to have urged it.

Meanwhile, there are two resolutions on mission, and here the problem isn't so much the lack of resolution, as it were, as it is that church planting isn't so much a matter of Directives From 815 as it is a diocesan response to a myriad of local conditions. The big issue I see from my examination of the statistics some years back was that the character/quality of the rector was nearly all-important. The ideal priest is a serious celebrant, a gifted preacher, and a caring pastor; but since Rev. Mary Poppinses are uncommon, just getting one of these characteristics goes a long ways towards making a vital parish; and conversely, a priest is aggressively off-putting in one of these areas can hut a parish very badly. And this isn't something that is addressed well through resolutions; it has to be part of church and especially clerical culture.

This brushes up agqinst another issue which I want to hold off on until I deal with things liturgical, but for now, consider all this positioning from the perspective of someone outside that certain upper middle class progressive viewpoint. Some of us who are outside this worldview are just stubborn and dismiss all this, and bully for us. But the church's adoption of this outside worldview, which is out-of-step with so very much of the population, is intrinsically exclusive. We focus too much on obvious differences like race and sexuality and ignore the far stronger (in this age) divisions of wealth and especially of class and politics. And when we enthrone the values and opinions of one class/subculture, it is alienating to outsiders. And it comes to look like a control issue, which makes the exlusion more real.

Our Mission: To Witness

For the Easter Vigil: this year the gospel was from Mark.

We have heard the story of how the women arrived at the tomb, expecting to find a corpse sealed behind the stone, and were met instead by the angel, the messenger of the great gospel: Jesus is risen! And thus is salvation announced, the miracle beyond miracles. Moses held out his hand, and God delivered the Hebrews though the cleft waters, a show of power befitting the efforts of Hollywood special effects. The people walked through the sea on dry land, and then the waters returned to wash away the forces of Pharaoh and deliver God's people from bondage. Against this spectacle the empty tomb pales, and yet it is this which changes the world forever, for at that moment, death was broken forever. And those women, and ourselves these two millenia later, were not the agents of this salvation, but only witnesses to God's mighty act:

“The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still."

In Mark's gospel, the women flee into silence, and yet we have their testimony tonight. Indeed, there are those who hold that the shortest versions of Mark are somehow truncated; and we have other versions which attempt to supply the seemingly missing ending, more or less clumsily. But that is not important, compared to the empty tomb and the angel's message, which is the conclusion of a single narrative common to all four gospels, to which they devote more space than any other single story. They all agree that Jesus took his disciples with him when he went to pray at Gethsemane, and that there he was arrested by guards from the temple, led by Judas; they all recount the same story of interrogation by Caiaphas and the chief priests, during which Peter denied his master three times, as prophesied; they all tell how Jesus was taken to Pilate, who condemned Jesus in spite of his obvious innocence, releasing Barabbas instead as a sop to the crowds. They all describe how Jesus was mocked, and how he was crucified with two others, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James looking on, but the disciples dispersed. and how his clothing was divided among the soldiers; and they all state that Joseph of Aramathea came and, with Pilate's permission, took the body away and laid it in the stone tomb, wrapped in a shroud, before the day was out.

But that is not the end of it, by no means. All four gospels continue, relating the same tale of Sunday morning: that at daybreak Mary Magdalene went to the tomb with other women and found it opened, and that Jesus' body was not there; they all say that she and those with her encountered an angel who asked her why she wept, and who told her that Jesus was not there, and that he was risen from the dead. Here, then, is the heart of the gospel message: Christ crucified, but also, Christ risen. Nothing is more important to the faith than this—nothing! Only the incarnation approaches it in importance. It is because of the testimony of these women, and that of the disciples after them, in their encounters with the empty tomb and the risen Jesus, that we have a religion to preach. It was this that Peter taught in his address to the crowd on the day of Pentecost, and which teaching put him and the other disciples in front of the Sanhedrin.

Paul likewise makes Christ crucified and risen again the center of his teaching, and so must we also bear witness, for if Christ were not arisen, what would the point be? It is the testimony of that Friday, and that Sunday morning, that gives meaning and justification to our gathering here, to remember again the glorious grace which we have received. Were Jesus not arisen, well, we have many moral teachers from around the world; what is one more? Were Jesus not arisen, what hope would there be in our faith? Were Jesus not arisen, why should the world heed our message?

But the tomb is empty, as the women related; Christ is arisen, and death's power is thus broken, to be utterly wiped away on the last day, when the old passes away and all is made new forever. It is these moments in history, in which salvation is realized, that are the foundation of our message to the world. The brokenness of humanity is something that anyone can see; human sinfulness is the one doctrine verifiable by ordinary observation. But salvation is hidden from such inquiry; it can be found only in the church, not because the church owns it, but because it is the church's testimony, the memory of those sacred days, that brings the message of salvation to the world. Without us as its messengers, who would hear of Christ? Who would know that salvation is there, and is freely given, and may be taken for no greater price than confession, faith, and baptism? And when we say to others, “you should live as we teach, in the name of Christ,” who should heed us? We know that Jesus is the incarnate Son, and that his teaching is that of God on earth; but we know him first as Jesus crucified, buried, and risen again, and it is this which compels our worship, because it is in this that we see the fulfillment of the LORD God's saving purpose. And if it is how we see what is revealed, it is thus how we must show others the same divine revelation. We must be witnesses to the world, not hiding in fear, but bold in proclamation. We did nothing to defeat death: God, in his incarnate son, did that. But now we have been made part of that miracle, and it is through us that the world may also become part of it. That is our mission as the church.

Christ is risen from the dead: that is our first message; come and be baptized: that is our second; live together in the kingdom as Jesus taught, doing his work as we await the last days in faith, love, and hope: that is our third. One follows from the other; they are not separate. So here we are, and what work must we do? Well, to live as Christ taught, of course, dead to sin in the sacrifice of his crucifixion, as Paul explained. But it is not simply a matter of living an upright and godly life in charity and purity of heart. No, to the best of our ability, and in the grace of the Spirit, we must carry out the will of the Father not only in abjuring sin, but in showing the Son to the world. Those outside the church need to see a reason for coming in, not just through our superior life (for at this we fail over and over), but through our superior knowledge: we know the story of salvation, and the world does not. The world chases after false gods: not only failing to see the LORD God as He is, and worshiping others in His place, but elevating human lusts and greed and impulses above all other principles, to the end that any kind of life together becomes predatory and abusive. We must offer them, instead, the one True God, incarnate in Jesus the only Christ, fully real and truly man, crucified at one place and time in Judaea while Pilate was procurator under the Emperor Tiberius, and risen again from the tomb in Jerusalem, and from thence returned to the heaven which is beyond our mortal and physical knowledge. As they are taught, and are baptized, and partake of the sacraments, then shall they know the Word Incarnate, and shall see the Godhead, and with us they may join in the work of the kingdom. And then with us they shall proclaim the mystery of faith:

Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!