That NEW Song: When I survey the wondrous cross

“That New Song: When I survey the wondrous cross”
Sermon by Carrie Eikler
Psalm 96
“Hymns that Shape Us” series Part 2: Watts and Wesley
June 26, 2011

Last week as Torin introduced our series on hymns that shape us, he gave you a few alternate versions of Amazing Grace. If you weren’t here, try putting the beloved hymn to the tune of Gilligan’s Island, for example. So to briefly ride on the Amazing Grace coattails Torin fashioned, let me tell you my most recent Amazing Grace story.

A few weekends ago Torin and I and our close friend Amy went to our first ever Mountain Stage performance. Mountain Stage is a National Public Radio music program that is recorded in front of a live audience here in West Virginia. If you ever are listening to West Virginia Public Radio between 8and 10pm on Saturday night or 3-5pm on Sunday afternoon, you’ll hear the host, Larry Groce booming: “Mountain Stage, live performance radio. from the Mountain STATE of West. Virginia.” They are usually recorded in Charleston, but about four times a year they come up here to Morgantown. For $15 you can hear five different musical acts for about two and half hours. It’s a good deal.

The headliners this time were the Grammy Award winning gospel singers, The Blind Boys of Alabama. The Blind Boys started singing together in 1939, with eight members. There are three of the original eight left. On this particular Sunday night at the WVU Creative Arts Center, the Blind Boys bassist started in in with the tune of House of the Rising Sun (there is a house in New Orleans, it’s called the Rising Sun…). But instead of a toast to New Orleans, the boys started in: “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found…” and the Blind Boys of Alabama aren’t called this only because they’re from Alabama. All of the original members are blind. There was almost a palpable, collective, fluttering of hearts in the audience—at least among the three of us (are they going to say it? Are they going to say it?): “was blind, but now, I see.” (they said it)

We heard that song in a very new way that night.

They say that your strongest musical preference is the music you were listening to between the ages of 15 and 18. It’s true. Nothing new today can beat the power of The Cranberries, Pearl Jam, and REM (for me). The psalmist says “sing a new song.” Now many of us don’t like that. We like our old songs, the goodies, the old-timies. Yes, even I have my preferences, even in church music.

But I don’t think I need to state the obvious, but I will. Even old songs, were new once. But it’s not that they are old that makes them special to many of you. It’s what you remember about them. It’s the memories that surround some of you when you hear Amazing Grace, or I walk through the garden alone. For some of us it’s the great Brethren hymn, Move in our Midst, or the adopted Brethren hymn, Brethren we have met to worship. It’s the majestic four part harmony of the “Old Hundredth” better known to newcomers to the Mennonites, Praise God from whom, #119.

So if you can’t quite get into the new songs, perhaps you can hear the eager whisper of the psalmist: at least…at least sing the old songs anew. Make them a new song to you. Meet them again, encounter them 20, 50, 70 years later not as children, but as adults who have seen what it means to struggle in life, who have faced death, who have lived with glimpses of resurrection. Meet these songs a new.

One of the church’s most beloved hymns consists of only 5 notes. 5. When I survey the wondrous cross was written in 1707 by Isaac Watts, an English hymnwriter. Lowell Mason put the words to tune we are familiar with in 1824 using an ancient Gregorian chant from the 6th century to shape his tune. So before it sounded the way we are used to hearing it, it was the poetry of one man’s heart.

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ, my God!
All the vain things that charm me most
I sacrifice them through his blood.

See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an off’ring far to small
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

(hold silence) How was that? Did you hear anything in it that you hadn’t before? A new image? A new stirring? A new connection between you and the writer, between you and Christ, between you…and God…something that gets lost when you sing what you’ve always sung, year in and year out? When you stop. Hearing. The. words.

Now, I invite you to take out your hymnals, turn to hymn 259 and see those words put to music.

So yes, poetry stirs us, but as we’ve been exploring, when you add the music, it takes us—maybe not to a deeper place, but a different place. And now, we’ve really heard the words…let us sing:

Sing 259 When I survey the wondrous cross

Like I said, even the old songs were once new, and what Watts and Wesley were writing were pretty radical for their time. They were frowned upon, questioned. Isaac Watts had written over 100 hymns by the time he was 23 years old. They were probably thinking “these young people and their music.” When Watts started writing his hymns, words such as “When I survey the wondrous cross…demands my soul, my life, my all”—such personal feelings—well, it was pretty controversial. Up to that time, much congregational singing was simply the repetitive chanting of the psalms.

In response to what he came to experience as droll repetition, Watts once commented that “The singing of God’s praise is the part of worship most closely related to heavem; but its performance among us is the worst on earth.” As Kenneth Osbeck reflects,“the unique thoughts presented by Watts in these lines certainly must have pointed the eighteenth century Christians to a view of the dying Savior in a vivid and memorable way that led them to a deeper worship experience.”

I appreciate the question that Osbeck’s reflection points us to: what leads us to “deeper worship experiences?” How do hymns disturb us into the depth of God’s love and challenge and awesomeness…and how do they simply comfort and console us. I wouldn’t say that one was necessarily better than the other, but what did the psalmist mean by sing a new song? For Watts and Wesley it was taking the chants that they felt were outside of human experience, the daily struggle, and writing hymns that put humanity alongside Christ, if only in our songs. It’s a good first step, isn’t it? To sing our way beside Jesus?

If you look in your hymnal to the second arrangement of When I survey the wondrous cross, #260, you’ll see the same words, to a different tune. The Hymnal Committee helps us sing this song anew…by placing the stirring words within an African tune.

The tune is a South African anti-apartheid protest song, originally written in Zulu, called Senzeni-Na. Senzeni-Na means “What have we done?” Meaning… “what have we done to deserve this? This apartheid. This oppression? Senzeni Na?” (click here for a youtube video of the song)

I wonder how Watts would feel about this. While he may have been radical for his time in writing about God in new, personal ways, he was a white, wealthy British man, part of an Empire mentality, shaped by an age of manifest destiny. So here, we are challenging Watt’s, if not directly, at least the age in which he lived, an age that shaped political and theological ideologies that supported slavery, expansionism, and the destruction of native cultures.

And we too, challenge ourselves when we sing When I survey the wondrous cross with the overtones of senzeni-na. We ask ourselves, what have we done to allow this sort of thing to happen in our world, as Americans in 2011. How have we crucified others alongside X.

We can start to accept the psalmists invitation. Sing a new song. As a confession. As a way of accepting God’s forgiveness.
[Choir-Senzeni-Na/when I survey]
[silence]

“O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.”
When we are comfortable in the songs we’ve always sung, and then we are disturbed by a new imagery and tunes…Christ is doing what Christ has always done…surprising us.

And When we are disturbed and surprised, not just in song, but when we are disturbed and surprised in our lives,
we will know what it means—

we have to sing a new song of the spirit.

Sing a new song, and let your life be the text, let your sorrows be the tunes, let your joys be the notes. Sing to the Lord a new song. Amen.