Sing All the Songs

Last fall in our adult Bible class at church, we were during a study on the minor prophets. To introduce that series, I shared some reflections from Walter Brueggemann's book Reality, Grief and Hope.

When you look at the poetry of the prophets, you see three different sorts of poetry, each with a different emotional tone. The prophets sing three different songs.

The first song is prophetic rage and indignation. This is the cry, "Let justice roll down like a river!" The is the song of the social justice warrior.

The second song is grief and lamentation, an expression of sorrow in the face of suffering and loss. These are the sad songs, full of tears.

The third song is a song of hope. This is the prophetic turn we see in Isaiah 40 where, after all seems broken and lost, a song of hope breaks out: "Comfort, comfort my people." This is the poetry of Ezekiel's vision in the Valley of Dry Bones. This is the song of Tolkien's eucatastrophe. 

The first point I made about these three songs is that we all have a natural tune we like to sing. Some songs we find easier to sing than others. As I mentioned, the social justice warriors among us are wonderful at the poetry of rage and rebuke. Some of us, myself among them, gravitate toward the sad songs and embrace lament. And finally, there are those who are good at finding hope where others cannot.

The second point I made was an encouragement to the class to sing, in addition to their natural poetry, all of the songs, even the songs that come most unnaturally. If you only sings songs of hope your faith will become trivial and superficial, disconnected from the injustice and suffering in the world. And if you only sing songs of anger or sorrow you'll burn yourself out, or fail to offer encouragement to those who most need to hear it. I learned that lesson out at the prison. When I first starting working in the prison I came singing my natural song--sorrow--but what the men in the study most needed was encouragement and hope. Consequently, I have learned to sing songs of hope. 

So, sing your natural song. Embrace it and sing it out loud. 

But also learn to sing all of the songs. Immature Christians tend to sing only one song. Anger, over and over. Lament, over and over. Or praise, over and over.

Mature Christians, by contrast, are better poets, skilled at singing all the songs and adapting the rhyme and meter of faith to the season and situation.