Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens! Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his excellent greatness! Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! …
Psalm 150:1-6
STORY
It happened on March 19, 1988 at Twickenham Stadium. Because of the athletic skills of Chris Oti, the Cambridge University Rugby Football Club team made a comeback victory over their arch rival, a team from Ireland. As the players left the field, the fans began to chant the words to the Negro spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Why? Oti was Black, and even though he brought the team victory, they refused to accept that a Black person could be the deciding factor. Racist – those sitting in the stadium seats chanted the words as a derogatory declaration of their discontent.
As years came and went, more and more dark-skinned players took to the field of play. And, as these Black players continued to excel in performance, racist fans sang Swing Low, Sweet Chariot throughout the games. So much so, the song became associated with English ruby games.
Then, in 1991, it happened. At the same stadium as before, just a few minutes prior to the rugby teams from England and France came onto the field to begin their conquest, the stadium erupted with the 80,000 gathered singing the African-American spiritual. The hymn that alluded to feelings of despair and the desire to be released from the bondage of slavery, became the rousing and enthusiastic unofficial anthem sung at the opening of this, and henceforth, all English rugby games.
The popularity of the anthem gained momentum.
The rugby union commissioned UB40 – the reggae-pop band famous for Red Red Wine – to record a version of the song before the 2003 World Cup. When England won, the song rushed up the charts.
Sponsors joined in, too. In the same year, after England won the World Cup in Australia, British Airways noted in a news release that the “appropriately named Sweet Chariot 747 came for to carry the victorious England team home.” The automobile manufacturer BMW built similar marketing campaign around the concept that its cars were “Sweet Chariots.”
When told about the awkwardness many Americans feel upon learning of the song’s repurposing, John Williams, the director of the Center for the Sociology of Sport at the University of Leicester in England, said, “I can understand that, and the only thing I could give them as a kind of strange reassurance is that I suspect the vast majority of people singing it have no idea where it came from, or even that it’s American at all, or that it has a black American heritage.” Williams then laughed when asked if song reflected a larger debate occurring in the rugby community, “The typical crowd that goes to watch the English national rugby team is not likely to be an audience that’s going to think hard about these types of questions or spend much time worrying about political correctness.”
Arthur Jones, a music history professor and founder of the Spiritual Project at the University of Denver, said the situation reminded him of American sports teams who use Native American names and imagery, in that a group of people seemed to be free-associating with imagery largely disconnected from its history. “My first reaction is absolute shock – and I actually understand it when I think about it – but that’s my first reaction. I feel kind of sad. I feel like the story of American chattel slavery and this incredible cultural tradition, built up within a community of people who were victims and often seen as incapable of standing up for themselves, is such a powerful story that I want the whole world to know about it. But apparently not everyone does.”
DEVOTION
Christian hymnody contains some of the most tightly packed, concise doctrinal and devotional thought of the church. Through congregational song God’s people learn their language about God; God’s people learn how to speak with God. Songs of worship shape faith. It is, therefore, very important that a congregation have a rich vocabulary of praise.
Through congregational singing Christian faith is expressed, and to a very real degree it is formed. Since people tend to remember the theology of a hymn, a congregation’s repertoire of hymnody is often of critical importance in shaping the faith of its people. Hymns stretch minds, increase vocabulary, rehearse the biblical story, and teach the mighty acts of God are essential for a congregation’s growth in faith. Music, quite apart from the sermon, is capable of evoking powerful emotions as hearts are stirred, tears flow freely, and the soul is transformed.
On Saturday, January 27 of this year, our Jewish brethren celebrated the Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Singing, which commemorates one of the most vivid musical performances in the Hebrew Bible: the song sung Miriam to celebrate the Israelite crossing of the Sea of Reeds (Red Sea) in their dramatic escape from bondage in Egypt. As we read in Exodus:
Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them:
I will sing to the Lord,
for he is highly exalted.
Both horse and driver
he has hurled into the sea.
David Stowe, a cultural historian at Michigan State University, wrote an article that was published in The Conversation on February 9, 2017, which informs us, “This Song of Miriam exemplifies one dominant motivation for sacred music: collective celebration. Sacred music has a unique ability to engage both body and mind. It brings people together in expressing gratitude, praise, sorrow, and even protest against injustice.”
Many congregations today, like the attendees at Twickenham Stadium, have lost their sense of the sacred. Just as the Negro spiritual had lost its depth of meaning and provocative message in a stadium of beer drinking fans, so Jesus’ music that has infiltered worship lacks a timeless foundation and an authentic manifesto. Jesus’ music are songs, and can never be classified as hymns. As they are here today, gone tomorrow, replaced by another, they are absent of any sustaining power that can only be acquired through centuries of liturgical employment. As they lack a significant theological message and are nauseatingly repetitious, they have been referred to as “Seven-Eleven” songs: seven words that are repeated eleven times. One of the reasons that I no longer worship at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the entire worship service is enveloped in Jesus’ songs that leaves me spiritually lifeless.
Congregational singing – collective celebration – brings us together as a community of believers, as well as transporting us into the presence of Christ.
Phillips Brooks is considered one of the most outstanding orators of the nineteenth century. Perhaps he was also a bit modern, as the Episcopal cleric preached not from the pulpit, but standing on the standing on the chancel steps, coming from behind the pulpit to stand among the congregants, as is often the case today, both in traditional and contemporary worship services.
Fond of hymns since childhood, he wrote several himself. The best known is a Christmas carol, that was inspired by a tour of Israel in 1866. The pastor, in a letter to the children of his congregation, shared a very personal experience from that excursion, “I remember especially Christmas Eve, when I was standing in the old church in Bethlehem, close to wear Jesus was born, when the whole church was ringing hour after hour with splendid hymns of praise to God, how again and again it seemed as if I could hear the voices I knew well, telling each other of the ‘wonderful night’ of the Savior’s birth.”
Reflecting on his Christmas Eve visit, he composed a hymn that encapsulated his feelings that evening, which he titled O Little Town of Bethlehem. The now-famous carol was sung publicly for the first time at the rector’s Church of the Holy Trinity, in Philadelphia, on Sunday, December 27, 1868, by a choir of thirty-six children.
O little town of Bethlehem,
how still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
the silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
the everlasting light;
the hopes and fears of all the years
are met in thee tonight.