The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
June 3, 2007
Vol. 10 no. 22

Everything But...
           Listed on page 720 of Voices United are “John Wesley’s Directions for Singing.” Some seem quaint, others rather blunt and salty, but by being there it is obvious that Wesley took singing in church seriously. Singing here is serious business too.
           As a result, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and a few others have tended to sing our theology rather than just state it in a cold tuneless proposition. We know the verses of a hymn better than a verse of Scripture. The liturgical churches would certainly intone Amen to that.
           You may have noticed that from time to time I cite (not sing!) a line from a popular song that illustrates a certain idea or emotion. We all sing those songs in the shower, in the car, at parties, for they have captured our spirit more effectively than well-crafted paragraphs.
           And that is why we come back again and again to the Psalms. They are nothing less than songs to which unfortunately we have lost the tune. Some people wonder why we persist reading them responsively in worship, for there are psalms that declare unusual desires of revenge and triumph. Unusual, that is, in churchy environments, not in everyday life.
           Those who have collected together those 150 psalms seem to have decided to draw those terribly human emotions and urges into the realms of the life of faith. No faith that hides from violence or revenge or hatred of enemy or pretends we should never talk about such things is a faith that possesses the right stuff to cope with and transform these strong emotions.
           So we sing a psalm together, or perhaps meditate upon it as poetically as possible. In a psalm we talk to God, God talks to us, and We converse with one another of things no one else mentions. A mind-full.