Tuesday • 12/12/2023 •

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, as we consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office this next Monday.

Praise and Certainty

I remember the exact moment the Christian faith became plausible to me. It was during a song, and it was a humbling moment. Humbling not just because I was coming to understand that the Christian faith attacks pride, and that I was a prideful person. No, it was humbling because the believability of the faith was coming in humble garb.

I was a guest at a college Christian fellowship, and a fellow student was singing a solo. The song was from the Billy Graham movie, The Restless Ones—the movie had seemed to me so not deep and so not cool! The song had a chord progression as rudimentary as “Heart and Soul,” and lyrics as catchy as, well, here’s the title: “He’s Everything to Me.” That’s all it finally took for the whole thing to seem believable to me? Yep.

I had been on an intellectual quest for God. For months I had been doing heady reading to sort through philosophical arguments for the faith. Abruptly, in a span of two minutes the simplest of songs wooed me into conceiving the possiblity that God’s Kingdom is real.

Years later, I took consolation in Catholic sociologist Werner Stark’s observation that “hymns are much more convincing, so far as live faith is concerned, than even [the] best arguments.” Stark was writing about Thomas Aquinas’s hymns, asserting that Thomas’s songs were more persuasive than his best arguments. In fact, I can read Thomas’s causal argument (for there to be “being,” there must first be “Being”) or his teleological argument (patterning in nature points to an Architect of nature) and nod my head in assent—that assent comes with its own wonder, and is its own worship. But I can sit at the piano and plink out Thomas’s “Humbly I Adore Thee,” and I melt into tears. The arguments help me look at the faith appreciatively, the hymns take me inside the faith viscerally.

Generation after generation, Israelites rehearse the fact that their forebears “walked on dry land through the midst of the sea” (Exodus 15:19 NRSV). What keeps if real for Israel is the song: “Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:1 NRSV). What keeps the fact of the “passing over” from being perceived as a freak of nature that can be shrugged off or a questionable claim to be investigated out of existence, is the doxology that was born on the night of the deliverance:

Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendor, doing wonders? (Exodus 15:11-12 NRSV)

Early in the Christian era, that same wonder overcame believers in Christ’s “passing over” from death to life in the wee hours of Easter morning. And so our forebears taught us to sing the “Exsultet”:

This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.

This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

How wonderful and beyond our knowing, O God, is your mercy and loving-kindness to us, that to redeem a slave, you gave a Son.

How holy is this night, when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to those who mourn. It casts out pride and hatred, and brings peace and concord.

How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 287)

Praise brings its own certainty. As U2’s Bono once said, “Music is Worship; whether it’s worship of women or their designer, the world or its destroyer, …whether the prayers are on fire with a dumb rage or dove-like desire…the smoke goes upwards…to God or something you replace God with…usually yourself.”

Even in a world that seems, to use another phrase from Werner Stark, “religiously deaf,” music does much in our day. It connects you to an identity (Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”) or moves a narrative along (Bear McCreary’s soundtracks for Battlestar Galactia and The Walking Dead) or even carries the narrative (Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton). But I think God’s primary intent for music is to keep the smoke going upwards, whether by connecting us with identity in Christ as simply as “He’s Everything to Me,” or by taking us into the narrative as profoundly as “The Exsultet.”

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+