Sing a New Song



Sing a New Song! “Songs in the Key of Life”—Psalm 40 Michael Mattox

My dad told me this story. He said that shortly before my mom died she made him promise that he’d always let her two youngest children, Michael & Kathy sing in church. She sang in church, and at the age of 45, she was dying way too young. But, she wanted something for her two and three year old children that she had had later in life, some 24 years after her first two children were born. So, as soon as we could, dad had us up there by the pulpit in little Assembly of God churches in Alpena and Green Forest, singing songs like “I’m in the Lord’s Army,” and “The Devil is a Sly Old Fox.” When we “graduated” to learning close harmony well enough to sing “Trust and Obey,” he beamed. Indeed, we were singing in church, just like he promised.

Singing was very likely the ONLY thing that actually kept me in the church. I certainly preferred singing over preaching. Growing up “Pentecostal style” I always secretly prayed the song service would go on long enough to crowd out the preaching time. And indeed, it might in those churches! Hours would pass by and we’d still be singing, but it seems now, looking back, Pentecostal people didn’t mark time quite the way we Methodists do. So, even though singing had been robust and spirit-filled, dad or my uncle Barney would always step to the pulpit for the preaching time, taking sometimes an hour more! God’s way, I suppose of teaching me a lesson about watching the clock at church.

Singing still keeps me in church. Certainly not just my own singing, but hearing the songs of the faithful keeps me grounded and rooted in this vast enterprise that God has going on where even the Church itself finds ways of singing new songs that remind us of just how far God is willing to go to redeem, heal, and restore humanity. Singing keeps me here, as I said, and I’m not the only one. And what’s more there are new songs that need singing. That’s always the case. The Church encounters times when hope is fading and trials are long and finds the urgent need to sing about how “my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness!” The Church goes through dry spells where faith seems elusive yet it learns to sing, “Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus.”

But the very first singing came through the most ancient of all songbooks, The Book of Psalms. Zach Roberts, our Associate Pastor and lead pastor here in The Connexion was so smart to adopt this theme for his preaching series on Psalms, “Songs in the Key of Life!” –a series title “borrowed” from Stevie Wonder’s fantastic 1976 double album of the same name from which all kinds of memorable tunes I can think of no songs more life-giving than these ancient Psalms which continue to pass the test of time.

In his “Introduction to the Psalms” the King James Version published by Grove Press, New York, Paul David Hewson writes this about the songbook of Judeo-Christian Faith (we know him best at Bono, leader singer for the legendary rock band from Ireland:

Explaining belief has always been difficult. How do you explain a love and logic at the heart of the universe when the world is so out of whack? How about the poetic versus the actual truth found in the scriptures? And what about the dodgy characters who inhabit the tome, known as the bible, who claim to hear the voice of God.

Explaining faith is impossible…Vision over visibility…Instinct over intellect…A songwriter plays a chord with the faith that he will hear the next one in his head.

One of the writers of the psalms was a musician, a harp-player whose talents were required at ‘the palace’ as the only medicine that would still the demons of the moody and insecure King Saul of Israel; a thought that still inspires, if not quite explaining Marilyn singing for Kennedy or the Spice Girls in the court of Prince Charles.

Abandonment, displacement, is the stuff of my favourite psalms. The Psalter may be a font of gospel music, but for me it’s in his despair that the psalmist really reveals the nature of his special relationship with God. Honesty, even to the point of anger, “How long, Lord? Wilt thou hide thyself forever?

Watch this from a U2 concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado, just outside Denver, where nearly 10,000 people gathered. Rolling Stone magazine listed the 1983 concert later in their listing of 50 Moments that Changed Rock and Roll. ()

Closing…

Psalm 40- one of many “Songs in the Key of Life!” How long? The answer to that provocative question asked over and over again may very well depend on YOU!

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