The aim of this paper is to explore the place of sadness in contemporary praise and worship music by examining three questions: Is there a place for sadness in contemporary praise and worship music? Should there be a place for sadness in contemporary praise and worship music? How can pastors, church leaders, and songwriters create a place for sadness in a contemporary worship service? These questions will surface throughout the paper, though not sequentially.
Method
The method used in this paper is Heintink’s Triangle, which consists of three separate cycles: the ‘hermeneutical perspective’, the ‘empirical perspective’, and the ‘strategic perspective’. The hermeneutical perspective moves from ‘prejudgment to observation to interpretation to providing meaning and, finally, to action. 1 The empirical perspective moves from observation to induction/supposition to deduction/prediction to testing and then to evaluation.2 The strategic perspective (or ‘Regulative Cylce’ by van Strien)3 begins with defining the problem and moves to diagnosis, then to a plan, and to intervention, and finally with evaluation. My use of this method will not rely on in-depth movements through each cycle. Instead, each cycle will be a set of lenses through which to explore another facet of this research. Each perspective is designed with different aims: the hermeneutical perspective to help us understand what is going on; the empirical perspective to explain what is going on; and the strategic perspective to create change.
The first section of this paper employs the hermeneutical perspective to understand the pastoral situation of a grieving parishioner in a contemporary worship
1GerbenHeitink, Practical Theology: History. Theory. Action Domains., trans.byReinderBruinsma (GrandRapids,MI:Wm.B.EerdmansPublishingCo.,1999),p.197.
2Heitink,p.231.
3Heitink,p.212.
service. The hermeneutical perspective will also help in understanding the nature of sadness from a psychological perspective. Through the strategic perspective, we will outline ways of mitigating sadness, including communal rituals of grief like corporate lament. The middle section of this paper will be theological reflection, utilizing the hermeneutical perspective again. I will examine the psalms of lament, drawing primarily from Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, and include a brief look at theological resistance to lament from Augustine, Calvin, and Barth. Through the empirical perspective, new research on the musical structure and lyrical content of the most popular praise and worship songs in the USA over the past twenty-five years will be presented to explain how these songs do not create space for sadness. The final section of the paper will address ministerial outcomes, using the strategic perspective to make recommendations for pastors, church leaders and praise and worship song-writers for creating a place for sadness in contemporary congregational worship.
Description and Analysis
I have known Benjamin4 for at least 5 years. I helped prepare him and his then fiancé for marriage and officiated their wedding. We met once a month after the wedding. About two years after their wedding, his wife was killed in a car accident. Through weeping with him in the hospital, presiding over his wife’s funeral service, and meeting almost every week for two years, I became one of his closest friends. Through our friendship, I learned how grief changed the way he experienced praise and worship music, and how little room our church had for sadness in our services.
4Nothisrealname
This paper will focus on ‘normal sadness’, a category which Horwitz and Wakefield argue should be differentiated from ‘Major Depressive Disorder’ in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual.5 ‘Normal Sadness’ is a response to loss.6 Specifically, it is a response that is context-specific and proportionate in intensity, duration and permanency to the magnitude and permanency of the loss. ‘Normal sadness remits when the context changes for the better or as people adapt to their losses.’7 Sadness may be a response to a loss of attachments, a loss of status, or a loss of meaning.8 These losses can be acute—like divorce or death—or chronic—such as stressful marriages, unemployment, poverty, oppression.9
Horwitz and Wakefield cite studies using across species—humans and primates10 —ages, and cultures to demonstrate the link between facial expressions of sadness and social situations of loss. These studies explore whether sadness as a response to loss is a design or a dysfunction, a learned cultural script or an innate mechanism. Babies, who are non-conditioned and pre-socialized, cried when their mother left the room, indicating a sadness associated with a loss of attachment. 11 Another study showed pictures of various facial expressions, told a story of loss, and then asked the group to match an appropriate facial expression with the story. When a study like this was done among five cultures—
5Thispaperwillnotexaminesadnessthatistheresultofmentalillness.
6AllanHorowitz,JeromeC.Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (NewYork,NewYork:OxfordUniversityPress,2007),p.27.
7HorwitzandWakefield,p.29.
8HorwitzandWakefield,p.28.
9HorwitzandWakefield,p.28.
10 HorowitzandWakefield,p.39.
11 HorowitzandWakefield,p.40.
Japan, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the USA—there was a 73-90% correlation.12 When expanded to include ten cultures—Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Scotland, Sumatra, Turkey, and the USA—there was a 72-92% correlation.13 Finally, when this study was conducted with an isolated, pre-literate people in Papua New Guinea, there was a 79% correlation.14
Culture is not a significant variable in understanding sadness as a response to loss, but it is not a neutral factor either. Culture sets the parameters for what is considered a proportionate response to loss. For example, culture helps to determine whether the response should be public or private, how intense the response should be, and how long it should last.15 Culture also defines the nature of loss. This may explain why some cultures seem to have disproportionate responses to loss. It is not because of different definitions of ‘normal’ vs. ‘disordered’ sadness but rather, as Horwitz and Wakefield argue, because of different definitions of what constitutes a minor and a major loss.16 Even ‘normal sadness’, however, can be dangerous if prolonged. ‘Intensely sad people experience decreased initiative, find less pleasure in life to motivate them, and tend to withdraw from everyday activities.’17 ‘Positive mood’, on the other hand, ‘…encourages activities required to obtain sexual partners, food, shelter, and other resources that increase survival and reproduction.”18
12 HorowitzandWakefield,p.41.
13 HorowitzandWakefield,p.42.
14 HorowitzandWakefield,p.42.
15 HorowitzandWakefield,p.43.
16 HorowitzandWakefield, p. 44.
17 HorowitzandWakefield,p.47.
18 ibid.
If sadness is a response to loss, and if losses cannot be avoided, then sadness cannot be eliminated. Furthermore, if long-term sadness can be damaging, it is important to find ways of mitigating sadness. Ethicist and theologian Dorothee Soelle identifies three phases of suffering common to the human experience.19 The first phase is silence, an inarticulate phase of shock, numbness, and groans. It is followed, or ought to be followed, by the second phase, lament. This is when pain is given voice. The third and final phase is change, where an individual is able to make the changes necessary to cope with a new reality. Movement through these phases is not automatic; one must be helped to the next phase. Horwitz and Wakefield attest that some cultures are better at mitigating sadness because they have strong social connections and collective religious rituals.20 It is perhaps the collective religious rituals that allows people within the strong social networks to help the sad individual to move from silence to lament, and then to change.
Theological Reflection
The Psalms of Lament
The Biblical psalms represent a rich tradition of communal religious rituals, many of which are expressions of grief and protest. Hermann Gunkel set in motion large gains in psalm scholarship over the past century and a half by applying the form-critical method to psalm study.21 The result was the discovery of a few recurring patterns in the ‘forms of expression and modes of articulation in the Psalms’.22 Though not every psalm
19 AsquotedbyAaronAnastasihere:AaronP.Anastasi,'AdolescentBoys'UseofEmoMusicasTheir HealingLament', Journal of Religion and Health, 44.3,(2005),303‐319,in <http://www.jstor.org/stable/27512872> [accessed 10/02/2014 11:31], p. 305.
20 HorowitzandWakefield,p.51
21 WalterBrueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (Minneapolis,MN:AugsburgPublishingHouse, 1984),p.17.
22 ibid.
may fit a category, the psalms are not to be treated as an isolated entity to be interpreted on its own, but rather as representing a ‘typical’ gesture, theme of faith, or ‘situation of faith and unfaith’.23
Sigmund Mowinckle, a student of Gunkel’s, developed this hypothesis by arguing that these ‘representative psalms’ are best understood in a ‘single liturgical setting that dominated Israel’s life’, although what that liturgical setting might be is disputed among scholars. Claus Westermann later urged that the ‘lament is the basic form of psalmic expression, and that most other psalm forms are derived from or responses to the lament’.24 Westermann outlined the structure of community and individual laments in the following way:
▪ Address to God
▪ Complaint
▪ Review of God’s past acts
▪ Petition
▪ Divine response
▪ Vow to praise25
Walter Brueggemann, drawing from both Mowinckel and Westermann, expands the outline by dividing the lament into the two broad headings of ‘pleas’ and ‘praise’, with further divisions as follows:
▪ Plea
o Address to God
23 ibid.
24 Brueggemann,p.18.
25 ClausWestermann, The Psalms, trans.byRalphD.Gehrke(Minneapolis,MN:AugsburgPublishing House,1980),pp.35‐43.
o Complaint
o Petition
o Motivations
o Imprecation
▪ Praise
o Assurance of being heard
o Payment of vows
o Doxology and praise
o From plea to praise26
Brueggemann organizes his study of the psalms around three general themes: ‘secure orientation’, ‘disorientation’, and ‘new orientation’.27 He suggests that the psalms can be grouped this way and that the ‘flow of human life characteristically is located either in the actual experience of one of these settings or is in movement from one to another’.28 The season of secure orientation is a season of well-being that ‘evokes gratitude for the constancy of blessing’.29 Disorientation, conversely, is a season of ‘hurt, alienation, suffering, and death’.30 The speech itself may reflect the disarray of life. New orientation is a surprising intrusion or intervention ‘when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through the despair’.31
26 Brueggemann,pp.54‐57.
27 Brueggemann,p.19.
28 Ibid.
29 ibid.
30 ibid.
31 ibid.
While there has been much scholarly writing on this subject, a concise summary of the purpose of lament can be found in Aaron Anastasi’s journal article outlining five ‘voices’. The first and second ‘voices’ overlap, as Anastasi sees lament as both a linguistic balm and as catharsis. He expounds on the therapeutic significance of lament by describing how the ‘poet and songwriter creates a language, which is re-created by the reader and listener’32. The result is that this language forces pain to be seen objectively, and the very objectification of pain makes it seem less potent. Moreover poetic language, as used in the lament psalms and in songs, utilizes the imagination, and can make losses more endurable.
The third voice of lament is to see lament as protest. Protest need not be seen as abrasive or destructive to the relationship. In fact, protest is, in one sense, proof of the relationship. It is because of Israel’s covenant relationship with YHWH that they protested when things did not seem to go as God had promised they would. Furthermore, though Anastasi does not outline this, protest is a way of bearing witness, in a creational sense, to a ‘good’ world, and, in an eschatological sense, to a world that will be made new.
Fourthly, lament can be a confession, particularly when there is an admission of appropriate responsibility and guilt. Finally, lament can be a reaffirmation of faith. The fact that a lament is expressed to God is a statement of faith in this God as both sovereign and loving. Anastasi cites Job, Psalms, and Lamentations of examples that God’s
32 Anastasi,p.309.
sovereignty is ‘subject to God’s desire to benefit God’s covenant partner’.33 God’s sovereignty is not absolutized; it takes the shape of God’s Love.
Resistance To Lament
Christians have not embraced the practice of lament without resistance. Neil Pembroke, in his book ‘Pastoral Care in Worship’, chose three theologians who pose an objection or at least a resistance toward the Christian practice of lament. Pembroke zeroes in on the Reformed tradition, selecting Augustine, Calvin, and Barth, perhaps because these theologians have a lingering effect upon the practice of American churches today.
St. Augustine viewed grief as an indication of disordered desire. ‘Grief, for Augustine, is not in and of itself sinful; rather, it is an indication that there is disorder in one's relational value system’.34 The relational life of a Christian has both a horizontal and a vertical dimension, and grief is ‘an indication that one has tied oneself too strongly to the horizontal axis’.35
Augustine wrote of his grief for his friend, Tasgate, as a confession of his disordered life before Christ. After his conversion, he described trying to hold back tears when his mother died. When unable to refrain from mourning, he confessed this weakness, asking those who read it not to mock him but to weep for his sin of being too attached to a person.
Pembroke summarizes:
‘Augustine contends that if a person is overcome with grief it is evidence of the fact that she is guilty of too much worldly affection. He would not think for a minute that one should raise a protest against God for what
33 Anastasi,p.311.
34 NeilPembroke, Pastoral Care in Worship: Liturgy and Psychology in Dialogue (London,UK:T&T ClarkInternational,2010),p.49.
35 ibid.
36
seems to be a hiding of the divine face in a time of deep suffering. Confession, not lament, is the appropriate response.’
Calvin appeared to view suffering as a divine intervention or providence, and as divine discipline. For suffering as divine intervention, Pembroke cites the following from Calvin:
“Thus, lest we become emboldened by an over-abundance of wealth; lest elated with honor, we grow proud; lest inflated with other advantages of the body, or mind, or fortune, we grow insolent, the Lord himself interferes as he sees to be expedient by means of the cross, subduing and curbing the arrogance of our flesh.”
37
Suffering for Calvin is an expression of divine providence because suffering comes from the hand of God. Suffering is how the Lord refines us. Pembroke writes, ‘For Calvin, the world is “a vast reformatory” ’38 It should be added, however, that Calvin was no stoic.
Calvin argued against the ‘new Stoics’ of his day, accusing them of converting ‘patience into stupor, and a brave and firm [person] into a block.’
39
In summation, Calvin views suffering as a tool in God’s hand with which He intervenes and disciplines us. Though it is natural to dread or even shun it, we should bear suffering patiently, for God uses it for our salvation. This view does not automatically preclude the protest of lament, but it does not invite it either.
Barth echoes Calvin’s emphasis on providence. For Barth, there is ‘no area, no aspect, no creaturely occurrence in the life of the cosmos that does not come under God’s rule, and, moreover, God’s will and purpose is expressed in all these things.’40 Yet
36 Pembroke,p.51.
37 ibid.
38 ibid.
39 Pembroke,p.52.
40 ibid.
providence cannot be reduced to the concept of fate. Rather, providence is ‘the superior dealings of the Creator with His creation, the wisdom, omnipotence and goodness with which He maintains and governs in time this distinct reality according to the counsel of His own will’.41
Suffering is the result of human life being lived in the ‘shadow of the cross’.42 Our response to suffering should be like Christ who ‘for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame’.43 For Barth, ‘this means in practice that the real test of our joy of life as a commanded and therefore a true and good joy is that we do not evade the shadow of the cross of Jesus Christ and are not unwilling to be genuinely joyful even as we bear the sorrows laid upon us’.44 This insistence on joy may result in the displacement of genuine lament in Christian worship and practice.
Lament in the Life of Christ
Confession, patience, and joy are not antithetical to lament, but when seen as the preferred response to loss, there is little reason to foster a place for lament in Christian worship. A frequent objection to lament is that laments are in the Old Testament, and thus under the old covenant. If one can show Jesus engaging in lament, a case can then be made to include worship practices of lament along with practices of confession, patience, and joy.
41 Pembroke,p.54.
42 Pembroke,p.53.
43 Hebrews12:2,ESV
44 ibid.
The Gospels record at least three occasions of lament as a response to sadness in the life of Christ.45 One is Jesus weeping as he enters Jerusalem, lamenting their coming destruction and their failure to act in a way that might have prevented it.46 Another is Jesus crying out on the cross, feeling forsakes, or to put it in Horwitz’s and Wakefield’s terms, the loss of his ‘attachment’ to the Father.47
But it is the first—chronologically speaking, according the Gospel accounts— occasion of lament in the Jesus’ earthly life that resembles most closely our occasions of sadness. Jesus has come to see his dear friend Lazarus, whom he had heard was ill. Upon arrival, Jesus hears that Lazarus is dead. Martha, Lazarus’s sister engages in a verbal protest, to which Jesus responds with words of hope. But when Mary, Lazarus’s other sister, arrives and collapses in tears, Jesus is ‘deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled’.48 Not all exegetes agree with this translation, however. George BeasleyMurray, for example, agrees with Schnackenburg’s view: ‘The word e˙mbrimasqai. . . indicates an outburst of anger, and any attempt to reinterpret it in terms of an internal emotional upset caused by grief, pain, or sympathy is illegitimate.’49 Even if we were to read this phrase as anger and not grief, we cannot be conclusive as to the object of this anger. Beasley-Murray is sure it is because those who are with Mary are grieving as ‘those who have no hope’, but might it not be at death itself? Anger, after all, is one of
45 Onemightfindmoreiflamentwereincludedas a responsetoanguish,suchasJesus’prayinginthe GardenofGethsemane.
46 Luke19:41‐44,ESV
47 Matthew27:46‐50,ESV
48 John11:33ESV
49 GeorgeR.Beasley‐Murray, Word Biblical Commentary NT Word Biblical Commentary (New Testament) (WBC‐NT), ed.byBruceM.Metzger,RalphP.Martin,LynnAllanLosie,Secondedn. (Nashville,TN:ThomasNelson,Inc.,2006),inAccordanceBibleSoftware,<Electronictext hypertextedandpreparedbyOakTreeSoftware,Inc.Version1.2>[accessed 9 June2014],John11:33
the responses to loss. A few verses later, John writes simply that ‘Jesus wept.’ Once again Beasley-Murray cannot accept these as tears of grief over Lazarus’s death; they must be tears of sadness over either the lack of belief of those present or of the destructive impact of sin in the world.50 With the latter explanation, however, Beasley-Murray may be splitting hairs. If sadness, as we have already seen, is a response to loss, then loss must be mourned, whether it is the macro loss of humanity’s peace with God, with one another, and with the world or the micro losses of death, illness, and more.
However one reads this story, it is clear that this text and its interpretation are pivotal in deciding the place of lament in the life of a congregation. If, as Beasley-Murray seems to be arguing, Jesus never truly grieved loss, then a church should spend little time on lament in its worship. But if even Jesus wept over the death of his friend and the sadness of the bereaved, then certainly the Body of Christ can and should lament losses in life.
Ministerial Outcomes
While congregants can act to change the culture in their churches, this paper will focus primarily on what songwriters can do to create a place for sadness. Songwriters can influence hundreds, if not thousands, of churches as their songs spread. However, since pastors and worship leaders get the most ‘platform time’ and tend to be the decisionmakers in a contemporary worship service, I will also mention possible action steps for them.
For Songwriters
50 WBC‐NT, John11:35
We begin by looking at what type of praise and worship songs might create a place for sadness, examining both musical structure and lyrical content. The following chart shows musical structure and the relevant emotion conveyed by the structure:
Notice that three of the four times sadness is the relevant emotion, the musical structure is a minor key. Minor keys communicate or instigate sadness.
These studies focused on ‘classical music’, but there is a corollary in pop music.
Aaron Anastasi published a journal article on ‘emo music’—a melodramatic sub-genre of pop music—as a ‘healing lament’. Emo music employs many minor chords and major 9ths. Anastasi writes that the effect is a lament-filled pop music that ‘provides some of the tools necessary to create a ‘holding environment’ where the sufferer is prompted, and feels comfortable, to begin to look more closely at issues of pain extant in his heart’.51
Since minor keys and minor chords convey sadness even in pop music, I examined how many praise and worship songs are in a minor key or prominently feature
51 Anastasi,p.312.
a minor motif. To narrow my research, I chose the 104 songs that have appeared in the ‘Top 25’ most sung songs in U.S. churches over the past twenty-five years. Christian
Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), a company that represents virtually every Christian music publisher and holds the largest catalog of praise and worship songs, publishes a ‘Top 25’ list twice a year. 52
Of the 104 songs that have appeared in the US Top 25 lists in the past twenty-five years, none are in a minor key. To categorize musical structure beyond key signatures, I developed a spectrum to measure the degree of a song’s ‘minor motif’, a subtler quality than key signature but a stronger descriptor than simply counting the number of minor chords per song. The categories and descriptions along the spectrum are as follows:
CATEGORY MM1 MM2 MM3 MM4
DESCRIPTION verse or chorusbegins or endswith a minor chord
verse and chorusbegin or endwith a minor chord
verse or chorusbegins and endswith a minor chord
verse and chorusbegin and endwith a minor chord
Here is a breakdown of how many songs quality for each category in the spectrum:
CATEGORY MM1 MM2 MM3 MM4
DESCRIPTION verse or chorus begins or ends with a minor chord
verse and chorusbegin or endwith a minor chord
verse or chorus begins and endswith a minor chord
verse and chorusbegin and endwith a minor chord
52 CCLIoperatesinseveralothercountriesandregions,but I chosetofocusontheUSsincethatismy ministerialcontext.
NUMBEROF SONGSOUTOF THE104 7 songs 1 song 1 song 0 songs
Only 9 songs out of 104 most sung praise and worship songs in the US over the past twenty-five years have a minor motif at all.
The first ministerial outcome for praise and worship songwriters has to do with musical structure. Christian songwriters can write more songs in minor keys or with ‘minor motifs’. Songwriters, though, are still dependent on local church worship leaders to choose these songs for Sunday worship.53
The second ministerial outcome for praise and worship songwriters has to do with lyrical content. Dr. Lester Ruth at Duke University studied the verbs of the songs in the same list of 104 most-sung praise and worship songs of the past twenty-five years54. The following is a chart of the must used verbs in those songs55 :
VERB OCCURRENCE
“Praise” 27 occurrences
“Sing”
occurrences
53 Thelistof104songsis a listofthemost popularsongsandisnotnecessarilyrepresentativeofall praiseandworshipsongs.Moreworshipsongsinminorkeysandminormotifsexistthanthefewin thelistof104.Theapplication,then,isnotsimplyformoresongstobewritteninminorkeys,but for worshipleaderstochoosethesesongsforSundayworship.
54 Ruth,Lester(2013)ComparingAmericanantebellumEvangelicalWorshipSongand ContemporaryEvangelicalWorshipSong:ReflectionsontheTrinityandDivineActivityWithinthe EconomyofSalvation,Availableat:http://sites.duke.edu/lruth/files/2013/08/Ripon‐0.4.docx (Accessed:June1,2014).
55 Ruth,Appendix A
“See” 20 occurrences
Verbs that convey what may be called a ‘negative emotion’, by comparison, have fewer occurrences 56 :
VERB
OCCURRENCE
“Cry” 6 occurrences
“Fear” 5 occurrences
“Die” 5 occurrences
“Mourn” 0 occurrences
Laments, however, need not tackle negative emotions ‘head-on’. Neil Pembroke differentiates ‘hard laments’ from ‘soft laments’ in the Psalms57. Hard laments are the abrasive, direct complaints that take an accusatory tone; soft laments involve ‘negative petitions’ like “Do not hide your face from me’, and express trust or hope in the midst of suffering. Two verbs that fit the description of a soft lament appear in Ruth’s study:
VERB
OCCURRENCE
“Trust” 4 occurrences
56 ibid.
57 Pembroke,pp.60‐62.
For Worship Leaders
While praise and worship songwriters can expand the pallet of musical structure and the range of lyrical content, they cannot make churches sing their songs. When a song appears on CCLI’s ‘Top 25’ lists, it is the result of many factors, not least of which are those that are record labels, recording artists, and radio stations. Worship leaders, however, can decide what songs their church will sing. Worship leaders can choose songs that fit the range of the human experience, regardless of the song’s popularity outside their church’s walls. A worship leader need not be a slave to the trend of big concert tours and radio play. They can be spiritually attentive to their own congregation and carefully curate songs that will help their people worship with petition, protest and praise, as it is appropriate.
If no song seems quite right for expressing the particular kind of pain or sadness, employing a ‘lament and refrain’ practice may be effective.58 According to Pembroke, this practice has its roots in medieval Jewish worship, and involves reciting various ‘poems of protest or piyyutim’ into the liturgy.59 Pembroke offers these stanzas to be coupled with the familiar chorus of ‘How Great Thou Art’ as the refrain:
Lament 1: Great you are, O God. Why have you forgotten us in our suffering?
Lament 2:
58 Pembroke,pp.64. 59 ibid.
We are hurting, Savior God. How long must we endure the pain?
Lament 3:
You are the rock of our salvation. Why do you hide your face from us?
Lament 4:
Christ has won the victory over sin and death. Alleluia! When will you lift the heavy burden from us?60
Beyond songs, worship leaders can also insert a responsive psalm-reading. Psalmreadings in the context of congregational worship can be an effective way for helping to bring language to the sadness in people’s hearts. While psalm-praying is a long-standing practice in Anglican churches and has been part of the Christian tradition from the early centuries, many churches with contemporary praise and worship services do not utilize the psalms in weekly worship. The practice can be simple:
• Put a short psalm of lament—like Psalm 6— on the screen
• Read the first line, have the congregation read the next, and alternate as such until the psalm is over.
For Pastors
While songwriters and worship leaders can help with the creating the expression of lament, pastors can help congregations to understand the purpose of lament. A ‘sermon series’—a popular devise in churches with contemporary worship services to tackle a topic or a book of the Bible in four to six weeks—on lament or on a few psalms of lament could be a way to help a congregation understand the role of lament in the life of faith.
60 Pembroke,pp.64‐65.
Sermons on sadness and loss in the life of Christ may be one way to challenge the assumption that the Christian life is always ‘happy’ or ‘victorious’.
For churches that follow a liturgical calendar, the season of Lent can be a time to tackle the dark emotions and difficult experiences in life. My own congregation did a series on lament during Lent, exploring subjects like suffering, grief, loneliness, anguish, failure and forsakenness each week. The key was linking the human experience with a psalm of lament and a moment in the life of Christ. Our congregation came to appreciate three themes that emerged each week. First, that the Christian is never alone, even in her suffering, for Christ is there; secondly, because Christ took our suffering upon himself, went to the cross and down to the grave, our suffering is not meaningless; and finally, because Christ was raised from the dead, our greatest pain—even our death—will not be the final word.
Conclusion
In summary, there appears to be little room for sadness in the contemporary praise and worship music. Creating collective religious rituals for lament is not only an effective way of mitigating sadness but also consistent with the rituals of lament found in the Psalms. Christians can find ways to express lament, even while confessing sin, remaining patient in hope, and joyful in expectation. However, with a few simple yet intentional changes, songwriters, worship leaders and pastors can play a role in creating a place for Christians to express sadness, and to do so not as ‘those without hope’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aaron P. Anastasi, 'Adolescent Boys'Useof Emo MusicasTheirHealing Lament', Journal of Religion and Health, 44.3,(2005),303‐319,in <http://www.jstor.org/stable/27512872> [accessed 10/02/2014 11:31].
GeorgeR.Beasley‐Murray, Word Biblical Commentary NT Word Biblical Commentary (New Testament) (WBC‐NT), ed.byBruceM.Metzger,RalphP.Martin,Lynn Allan Losie,Secondedn.(Nashville,TN: Thomas Nelson,Inc.,2006),in Accordance Bible Software,<ElectronictexthypertextedandpreparedbyOakTree Software,Inc. Version1.2>[accessed 9 June2014].
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GerbenHeitink, Practical Theology: History. Theory. Action Domains., trans.by Reinder Bruinsma (Grand Rapids,MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans PublishingCo.,1999).
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Lester Ruth (2013) Comparing American antebellum Evangelical Worship Song and Contemporary Evangelical Worship Song: Reflections on the Trinity and Divine Activity Within the Economy of Salvation, Available at: http://sites.duke.edu/lruth/files/2013/08/Ripon-0.4.docx (Accessed: June 1, 2014).
Claus Westermann, The Psalms, trans.byRalphD.Gehrke(Minneapolis,MN: Augsburg PublishingHouse,1980).
Referenced:
Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit, 2ndedn(Eugene,OR:Wipf & Stock,2007).
Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel's Worship, trans.byD.R. Ap‐Thomas (Oxford,UK:BasilBlackwell,1962).
ClausWestermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, trans.byKeithR.Crimand RichardN.Soulen(Edinburgh,UK:T&TClarkLtd.,1981).