Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

DEVIL MUSIC?
What’s the deal with CrossPoint?  On most Sunday mornings the band fires up some ungodly, un-spiritual, secular radio song right before the preaching of God’s Word.  Why on earth is that a good idea?  Shouldn’t God’s Word be set up with the most sacred, religious, pure and holy music that we can imagine?  Isn’t listening to secular music a sin?  I mean, I smashed or burned all of my Ted Nugent records at youth retreat in 1982.  Don’t you guys know that God’s House is not the place for that kind of nonsense?  Does Bob Larson need to play more records backwards for you?

It occurred to me that some people may be asking these kind of questions when they see that we often play songs by all sorts of pagans during our Sunday service.  Since I have been the worship leader at CrossPoint we have played songs by  Kansas, Eric Clapton, Green Day, Good Charlotte, Coldplay, KISS, Linkin Park, Talking Heads, The Who, Madonna, Rare Earth, Rolling Stones, Peter Gabriel, Sevendust, Beatles, David Matthews, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Lenny Kravitz, Bob Marley, Kool & The Gang, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Tom Waits, Don Henley, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Blind Faith, Seal, The Cure, and honestly, we’re are likely to play a song by just about anyone.  I’m certainly not saying that all of those artists are rank pagans, because I don’t know any of them, but I am saying that their music is not usually thought of as sacred (or church music).  We tend to play these songs just before the sermon.  It sets the tone, introduces the topic, and gives an emotional and cultural touch-point for what is going to be talked about.

THAT’S NOT RIGHT!
There have certainly been people who are critical of this practice, but I believe their criticism is contrary to biblical teaching.  They would say that entertainment has no place in worship, and the music/lyrics of the  ungodly should not be used in holy worship.  One Christmas I received an Email from a very angry member of the congregation because we played John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas.”  She reminded me that John Lennon was an outspoken atheist, so his music was “not at all” fitting for a church service.  Imagine that.

WESTERN SOUNDTRACK
In the Western culture there are many works of music that “most of us” are familiar with.  We have heard them on the radio, on T.V., at the mall, in the grocery store, during football games, at the park, in movies, etc.  The soundtrack of Western Civilization includes many pagan artists that have become part of our cultural make-up.  I pull from this lexicon of popular music to find common ground with our audience.  If we are teaching on grace, I will search for a song that illustrates grace in either a positive or negative way.  Sometimes music can reach deep into us, places that logic can’t touch, places of deep memories and nostalgia.  Maybe the song will open our hearts in a way that some other sermon illustration wouldn’t.  Maybe it will open the door for a conversation at work during the next week, “You’ll never believe what song they played at my church this week!”

I’M GONNA NEED A VERSE!
St Paul certainly knew the value of using popular artists of his day to teach and preach.  He must have been a fan of Greek and Roman pagan poetry and philosophy (the secular rock stars of his day), because he used direct quotes from Hymns to Zeus in his sermons and in his epistles that make up the New Testament.  There are three famous quotes of pagan poets in the New Testament by St Paul, first the pagan philosopher/poet/mystic Epimenides in Titus 1: 12 when he says “Even one of their own prophets has said, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.”  The second is when Paul is speaking at the Areopagus (in Acts) and quotes Cleanthes (from The Phoenomena of Aratus) saying that their native poets had said, “For we are also his offspring.” And, the third is in his writing to the Corinthians where he writes, “Evil communications corrupt good manners” or “Evil associations destroy excellent characters” from a tragedy of Euripides.  These quotations were from popular hymns to Zeus that would have been as common to a Greek audience as the Beatles would be to us today.  These are not the only times in the Bible that the words of pagans were used by God to teach something true.  Evil men speaking evil words (untrue words)  and then God’s people using those words to say something right and true.  God is constantly doing this.  He is doing it right now, to a much lessor extent, through me.  (ahem)

KEEP IT TO YOURSELF!
You may be wondering why I put the word secular in quotes (up there, in the title).  The reason is because I don’t think anything is truly secular.  St Paul was pretty fond of quoting another popular poet, too, his name was David, and David said “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” in Psalm 24:1 (Paul quoted this in 1 Corinthians 10:26).  I take this to mean that some things might not be specifically “sacred” but that doesn’t mean that they are evil.  There is not a good team (God, the angels and the church) and a bad team (the Devil, his demons, rock stars and politicians) with secular things belonging to the bad team.  Next week at CrossPoint we going to be talking about how we must teach our children to honor their bodies and maintain sexual purity as part of a series on Biblical parenting.  So my job is to find a song that will remind us of this and set up the tone for the sermon.  Do you remember the Georgia Satellites?  “No huggie, no kissie, until I get a wedding ring!”  (See how this works?)

A CHURCH THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Imagine a small farming community in the Midwest U.S.A. There are two churches in town, the first is a painted church with wooden pews, and the second is a brick church with fold-up chairs. One Sunday a member of the brick church visited the painted church. He wrote an Email to his friend about the experience:

CHURCH ONE: PAINT AND PEWS
I just had the strangest experience. I went to this church, and it was sooooo dead. They even played funeral music. We sang songs out of a thick blue book, and it seemed like all of the singing came from behind me. The funny thing is that I was in the back row .. then I noticed that there was a balcony and they made the singers stand up there. I guess there wasn’t room for them on the stage because of the big table. They had two pulpits, and neither of them were in the middle. When we prayed everyone was completely quiet, and the guy praying was reading his prayers. What’s the point? No one seemed very excited about anything. DON’T THESE PEOPLE KNOW THAT JESUS DIED FOR THEM! The preacher stood behind one of the pulpits and said a bunch of stuff … He didn’t seem very emotional about any of it. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was so bored. I really feel sorry for them.

A few weeks later someone from the painted church went with their cousin to visit the brick church. They wrote an Email to their friend, too:

CHURCH TWO: BRICK AND CHAIRS
This morning I visited the other church in town. Dude! I had heard things about this church, but I really wasn’t ready for this. The music was terrible! A rock band complete with spiky hair and shiny shirts. It just went on and on and on … “I could sing of your love forever … and I will … this morning.” Everyone was acting crazy. Lifting their hands in the air, crying (in public!), shouting, and the prayers just kept going in circles … like they hadn’t thought about what they were actually going to say. Note to self: When you are going to address the Creator of the Universe, have a clue as to what you might say. The pastor (I think he was a pastor?) walked all over the stage and seemed to be very excited about whatever it was he was saying. Everybody kept coming up to me and giving me hugs, saying they were so excited to see me. Honestly, if I hadn’t been with my cousin I would have been completely creeped out. It all seemed so phony.

They didn’t know it, but they had a mutual friend. And this friend is the person that they both sent their Emails to. Actually, it was me. I am the friend. I knew them from Illinois State Choir Competition.

I wrote them back:

BALANCE
Church is a funny thing. Some people want to build a beautiful fireplace and then never light a fire in it. Elaborate fireplaces that have never seen fire. Other people want to light fires, but don’t bother to build any fireplace to hold it. They just burn everything in sight (probably why they don’t have a table, or pews anymore.) Some people want church to be an exciting and completely separate event from the rest of their life, and other people want church to feel “normal” and “ordinary.” What appears to be dead might actually be very much alive, and what appears to be alive and exciting might actually be made of plastic cheese. Jesus has true followers at both churches, people who are there to love God and love others, people who are there to worship and thank Him. I don’t have to tell you that there are people at both churches that are not true believers, you already know that.

Matthew 13:24-30 (The Message)

24-26 He (Jesus) told another story. “God’s kingdom is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. That night, while his hired men were asleep, his enemy sowed thistles all through the wheat and slipped away before dawn. When the first green shoots appeared and the grain began to form, the thistles showed up, too.

27 “The farmhands came to the farmer and said, ‘Master, that was clean seed you planted, wasn’t it? Where did these thistles come from?’

28 “He answered, ‘Some enemy did this.’

“The farmhands asked, ‘Should we weed out the thistles?’

29-30 “He said, ‘No, if you weed the thistles, you’ll pull up the wheat, too. Let them grow together until harvest time. Then I’ll instruct the harvesters to pull up the thistles and tie them in bundles for the fire, then gather the wheat and put it in the barn.’”

May we come together in the communities of faith where God has placed us, and worship Him without pride or arrogance toward our neighbors.

(Thanks to Pastor Douglas Wilson for the fireplace analogy)

There is a lot of talk about worship. What kind of music should be played, what form and style of service is best suited for the church, what is best pleasing to God, and what is best pleasing to us. We confuse the idea of worship with singing, and we turn the focus of our attention to our preferences and what is pleasing to us. We define and re-define worship to accommodate ourselves.  (more…)